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One of my fondest memories of working for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism was helping lead a group of international tour guides and travel bloggers on a tour of historic attractions in the Arkansas Delta in 2017. Our first stop: Dyess (Mississippi County), the boyhood home of music legend Johnny Cash.
Dyess, formerly known as Dyess Colony, was one of several "resettlement colonies" for impoverished farmers who suffered during the Great Depression. The area around Dyess was prime farmland, but by the end of the 1920s, several disasters had devastated the Delta's small independent farmers. The great flood of 1927 was followed by a severe drought. And in 1929, the stock market crashed and banks failed across the country. By 1930, nearly two-thirds of the state's independent farmers had lost their farms and fell into tenancy.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, he created several federal agencies to create jobs and rebuild America's economy. Two of these agencies included the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), both of which aimed to help impoverished farmers and sharecroppers.
Mississippi County native W. R. Dyess was appointed as Arkansas’s first WPA administrator. He proposed a plan to the president's advisers through which tenant farmers could buy their own farmland. FERA purchased about 16,000 acres of bottomland in the county, and with the assistance of $3 million in federal funds, that bottomland would become a "resettlement colony" to homesteading families, who would each receive 20 acres of land for a home and a farm.
Roosevelt and his advisers signed off on the proposal and in May 1934 "Colonization Project No. 1" was established near Arkansas Highway 297 in southwestern Mississippi County. It would later become known as Dyess Colony. In June 1936, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Dyess Colony, where she made a speech at the WPA administration building and met with the community’s residents for several hours
One of the families that applied for and was accepted to become part of the Dyess Colony experiment was the Cash family from Kingsland (Cleveland County). In 1936, Ray and Carrie Cash moved their family to Dyess Colony. One of their young sons, J.R., who was known by his friends as "John" and later as "Johnny," would go on to become one the biggest stars in American music history.
Cash graduated from Dyess High School in 1950 and wrote the song "Five Feet High and Rising" about growing up in the small community. His younger brother, Tommy, would also go on to have some success on the country charts.
In 2011, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro purchased Cash’s boyhood home, which by that time had become dilapidated and was listed on the Historic Preservation of Arkansas’ most endangered places list. A-State restored the house to its original condition, and the home opened to the public on Aug. 16, 2014. Other historic buildings in Dyess have been restored, and the small town has become a popular tourist destination.
When I led that tour of travel guides and bloggers in 2017, I was afraid the group wouldn't be familiar with Cash or his music and not too excited about visiting the house. So I brought my guitar, and after we toured the small home, I sat down on the front porch swing and began to play some of Cash’s hits.
Much to my amazement, the group knew every word to every song. It was a special moment that proved music is an international language that brings us all together.
A proud sixth-generation Arkansan, Darrell W. Brown is a lover of all things Arkansas. He lives in Saline County with his wife, Amy, and their beloved Boston Terrier, Dixie. Brown teaches history and broadcasting at a private school in Bryant. Find him on Facebook and Instagram at AllAroundArkansas.
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