Johnny Cash Heritage Festival

The Johnny Cash Heritage Festival, Oct. 19-21 in Dyess
Headliners include Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson

from an "Arkansa Times' artiicle---
From 2011-14, Arkansas State University hosted annual one-night-only concerts at the campus's Convocation Center in Jonesboro to raise money for the restoration of Johnny Cash's home. This fall will be the first time the concert will be held in Dyess.

"There was always this idea, once we got the house restored, we'd move the festival to Dyess," said Ruth Hawkins, executive director of ASU's Heritage Sites program, which also has tackled restoration projects in Tyronza, Piggott and Lake Village. The program's work has resulted in not just remodeling old buildings but in reviving their historical significance and teaching about their life-changing effects on people.

"So much of who we are as Americans is from this part of the country," Rosanne Cash said. "Who would we be without the Delta blues, without gospel music and Southern roots music? So much of it seems to arise from the very soil here. It's really special to bring music back to those fields."

Cash won three Grammy Awards in 2015 for her study of those roots and that soil, an album called The River and the Thread.

She and Kris Kristofferson, a lifelong friend of her father's, will be the main stars of the three-day festival this fall. Johnny Cash's youngest siblings, Tommy Cash and Joanne Cash Yates, will precede them onstage.

The shows, along with an opener by Buddy Jewell, a Lepanto native with roots in Dyess, will be on a stage on the western edge of the Cash homestead on the afternoon of the third, and final, day of the festival.

All are playing for free, and the festival has a preliminary budget of $100,000, Hawkins said.

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Proceeds from this year's festival will go toward reconstruction of a barn, a chicken coop, an outhouse and a smokehouse that were once on the Cash property. Another project is to acquire one of the two dozen or so Dyess Colony homes still standing and move it just west of the Cash homestead, to house a caretaker who'll add a layer of security to the property. Officials also plan a walking and biking trail through the community.

The four annual concerts in Jonesboro raised some $430,000 for various restoration projects in Dyess, including Cash's boyhood home. Another $3.2 million has been received in federal and state grants. So far, actual costs for completed projects and projections for future projects total $4.6 million, against slightly more than $4 million in money raised.

Rain will not stop the show.

Hawkins said her best guess for a turnout, for now, would be 3,000, but that is only because she likes the symbolism of numbers. Dyess' population once reached a high of about 3,000, she said. Fewer than 500 people live there now.

The festival is another step toward Hawkins' overall goal of attracting tourists and their dollars to Arkansas towns that have rich heritages but have fallen on hard times. Hawkins said research on similarly situated tourist attractions, indicates that tourists' spending in the Dyess area could eventually reach $10 million a year.

Jeff Bailey, 38, is owner of Bailey's Grocery, Dyess' sole grocery store. There used to be five. Just a block from the Dyess Colony Center, it's in a prime spot to do some business this fall.

"We certainly hope it generates some revenue here," said Bailey, a third-generation Dyess resident. "I don't know that we've seen anything this big before. I mean, Kris Kristofferson and Rosanne Cash, that's big."

Jewell, he said, also is popular locally. "I think maybe being in the middle of town will help our store," Bailey said. His store gets five or six customers a week from people trying to find the Cash home.

Bailey no longer sells Cash souvenirs -- the visitor's center has that market cornered -- but he might stock a few items for the festival.

Just north of town, on Arkansas 14, the old and eclectic McCrory General Store once had a few Cash trinkets for sale among other dusty wares, but its owner, George Washington (G.W.) McCrory, died last June at 92. The store, which opened in 1953, has been closed since.
Saved by Dyess

With eight months to go, many festival details are still being ironed out.

Staff members at ASU will handle much of the logistics and advance work, including lining up food vendors (no beer or alcohol will be sold), other entertainers, various Depression-era demonstrations and exhibits, and portable toilets. A production company will set up the stage, and manage the sound and lighting.

Traffic on the three two-lane highways that border Dyess on the north (Arkansas 14), east (Arkansas 297) and west (Arkansas 77) won't be a concern for Maj. Larry Robinson, chief deputy of the Mississippi County sheriff's office.

"I don't see any problem," Robinson said last week, likening the event to deputies' work for the weeklong Mississippi County Fair held every year in Blytheville. "Those are good highways up there. We'll have the manpower."

Festival organizers also don't anticipate a throng of overnight campers, whether by tent or RV, because there will be no night-time events. Music during the first two days of the festival will be performed at the Dyess Colony's town circle, as will educational talks about Cash and how he and his music were influenced by the Great Depression, the Delta, and the floods of 1937.

Cash was 3 years old in 1935 when he and his family moved from Kingsland (Cleveland County), over some 225 miles of axle-breaking roads, to the Dyess Colony, which was established in 1934 under the Roosevelt administration's New Deal program to help families recover from the Depression.

"People don't think about how much the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration [a jobs program] did for America and for 500 desperately poor Arkansans," Rosanne Cash said. "The Cash family moved here in 1935, and it saved them. That is not an exaggeration at all."

Sturdy, no-frills homes awaited the Cash family and 499 others in similar predicaments. They cleared the land of stumps left from trees cut decades before, drained swamps and planted crops on 20-40 acres, with promises of paying back the government as best they could.

The two youngest Cash siblings, Tommy and Joanne, were born in Dyess. Johnny's brother, Jack, died there when he was 15, from injuries suffered in a wood-working accident at the high school agriculture shop. He is buried a few miles away, in the Bassett community. Johnny Cash graduated from Dyess High School in 1950, hit musical stardom by 1956, and died in 2003, at age 71.

He visited Dyess and Kingsland as often as he could, including performing two shows in Dyess one day in 1968 that drew about 2,500 people.

"You didn't see an interview with my dad that he didn't mention how formative growing up here was for him and how his music was seeded from this very soil and hard work and the family," Rosanne Cash said. "He took such great pride in it. He did not romanticize picking cotton for one second, but he knew the value of learning a work ethic. He took that work ethic with him his whole life."

Keynote speakers for the festival will be Michael Streissguth, a communications and film professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and Bill McDowell, a professor of art and art history at the University of Vermont. Both are considered experts on the New Deal.
Colony homecomings

Hawkins said ASU officials want to encourage hotels in Jonesboro, Marion, Osceola, West Memphis and Blytheville to set up shuttles to drive hotel guests to and from Dyess. There was no mention of hotels in Memphis because the whole point of the ASU Heritage Sites program is to boost tourism in Arkansas.

Shuttles will also take visitors to and from the colony center to the concert venue, Hawkins said.

When Johnny Cash announced his plans to go to Dyess on Feb. 4, 1968, for a homecoming celebration, he said he would play as many concerts as it took to make sure there was room for anyone who wanted to attend. He played two, each about 2 hours long, with help from the Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins and the Carter Family.

"But it was Johnny Cash that the entire Tomato FFA chapter hitchhiked to see and it was Cash who drew the greatest response with his jerky motions, his downright scary voice and those steely dark eyes that bored big bullet holes in the back of school custodian E.O. Woodie's brand new gym," reporter Mike Trimble wrote in the next day's Arkansas Gazette.

Now based in Nashville, Tenn., Jewell said by telephone last week that one of his great-grandfathers joined the Cash family as Dyess Colony pioneers. When Jewell was 2, around 1963, he and his parents lived in the colony's administration building after it had been divided into apartments. "Most of my memories are from visits back to Dyess after I got older," Jewell said.

Jewell's career got a kick-start in 2003 when he won Nashville Star, a singing competition on the USA Network. That led to a contract with Columbia Records. His second album for Columbia included a song he wrote, "Dyess, Arkansas."

In 2007, before ASU committed to the Dyess projects, Jewell and Tommy Cash played at "Dyess Days," a small festival aimed at raising money for the administration building's restoration. "We packed the gym out, maybe raised $25,000 or so," Jewell said.

Jewell said he tried to get included in the lineup for any of the four ASU concerts in Jonesboro but was unsuccessful. "To be honest, I felt a little slighted, but it's good to be able to go back now," he said.

General admission tickets for the festival are $25. Tickets for good seats are $50, and $100 for better ones. They go on sale at 10 a.m. March 3 at the ASU Convocation Center box office, and can be obtained by telephone at (800) 745-3000 or through two websites: johnnycashheritagefestival.com or astate.edu/tickets.