Sun Records founder Sam Phillips with country singer/songwriter Johnny Cash, as he gives him a framed record of the song “I Walk The Line” to commemorate a milestone in album sales. When his hitch in the service was over, Johnny Cash moved to Memphis, where he sold appliances door-to-door while trying to break into the music business. With a few of his buddies, he started a band called the Barbarians to play in small night clubs and honky tonks around the air base. He was serving with the Air Force in Germany when he bought his very first guitar. The Korean War was raging, and he enlisted in the United States Air Force. When Johnny Cash graduated from high school in 1950, there was no question of his going to college. He entered talent contests and sang anytime and anywhere people would listen. He took his first non-farm job at 14, carrying water for work gangs, but he had set his heart on a music career. 1957: Country singer and songwriter Johnny Cash in Memphis, Tennessee. By 12 he was writing poems, songs and stories. Johnny loved his mother’s playing and singing, and he was entranced by the country and gospel singers he heard on an uncle’s battery-powered radio. Johnny’s mother, Carrie, played guitar, and the whole family sang hymns and traditional tunes.

In the evenings when the day’s chores were done, the Cash family gathered on their front porch.

Johnny worked side by side with his parents on the farm. Working together, they cleared 20 acres of land to grow cotton. The Cash family took the government up on this offer and made the move. Roosevelt encouraged marginal farmers from the hill country to resettle in the more fertile soil of northeastern Arkansas. In 1935, the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Cash’s boyhood home, along with the colony’s headquarters, reflect life in a northeast Arkansas community built on once-sunken land. memorabilia and money from Johnny Cash’s family and friends have helped historians restore a significant part of the Historic Dyess Colony, a government collective built to pull Depression-era families out of poverty.

The childhood farmhouse, dating to the mid-1930s, of singer Johnny Cash in Dyess, Arkansas.

Life had always been difficult there, but when the Great Depression destroyed the fragile agricultural economy of the region, Johnny’s parents, Ray and Carrie Cash, could barely earn enough to feed their seven children. Johnny Cash was born in the small town of Kingsland, in the hill country of southern Arkansas.

Cash by Johnny Cash