Featured image: Rosanne Cash (left) looks up at a statue of her father, Johnny Cash, during an unveiling ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 24, 2024. (Arkansas Advocate)
By Antoinette Grajeda, Arkansas Advocate
Arkansas native and singer-songwriter Johnny Cash became the first professional musician honored in the National Statuary Hall Collection when his bronze statue was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol Tuesday.
Speakers at the hour-long ceremony included members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation and Cash’s family, who described the Grammy-award winner as a man of faith who had a deep sense of justice, a strong work ethic and a way with words. The “Man in Black” embodied the American spirit and his story is one of redemption, they said.
Cash joins civil rights activist Daisy Lee Gatson Bates as the second Arkansan honored with a bronze statue at the Capitol this year. Officials unveiled Bates’ likeness in May.
Rosanne Cash, Johnny Cash’ daughter and one of about 100 family members present at Tuesday’s ceremony, said “there was something beautifully symmetrical” about Bates and her father sharing representation of Arkansas in Washington D.C.
“They were both committed to justice for all and to advocacy for the marginalized and those who lived with the boot of oppression on their necks,” the Grammy-award winner said. “Although approached from different paths, they were both healers and unifiers.”
Congress in 1864 authorized states to donate up to two statues for inclusion in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Arkansas installed statues of Uriah Rose, founder of the Rose Law Firm and the American Bar Association, and James Paul Clarke, former U.S. senator and Arkansas governor, in 1917 and 1921, respectively.
In 2019, Arkansas lawmakers approved legislation to replace those statues with likenesses of Cash and Bates. Those in favor of their replacement have noted Rose and Clarke’s obscurity as well as controversial ideologies — Rose was a secessionist and Clarke was a white supremacy advocate.
A committee commissioned Arkansas artist Kevin Kresse to sculpt the bronze Cash statue, which depicts the Country Music Hall of Fame inductee stepping forward with his head bowed as he holds a Bible in his right hand. A strap securing his guitar on his back is slung over his left shoulder.
Kresse has previously sculpted busts of other Arkansas-born musicians including Al Green, Levon Helm and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland to a family of Arkansas sharecroppers in the middle of the Great Depression in 1932. Cash grew up working the cotton fields in Mississippi County. He and his six siblings were raised in a five-room farmhouse in Dyess that now serves as a museum.
The Gospel Hall of Fame inductee was introduced to the guitar by his mother and to music by a local Church of God, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. He first sang on the radio at KLCN in Blytheville while attending high school. After graduating in 1950, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.
Cash broke into the music scene on Memphis’ Sun Records in 1955 and is remembered for iconic songs like “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line,” and his historic concerts in California’s Folsom and San Quentin prisons.
While Cash had “an unspectacular childhood” like thousands of other kids across the Delta, that’s what makes him so special, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Millions of Americans could look at him and his success “and still say he is one of us,” Sanders said.
“Johnny Cash walked the line. It wasn’t a straight line, much more like the Arkansas River — jagged, but always moving forward,” she said. “We’re a nation of second chances, of constant reinvention, of continuous redemption. Where a singer can start in the cotton fields and eventually perform in stadiums.”
Cash struggled with drug addiction, but eventually got sober. In 1989, Cash told a group of social workers and drug abuse counselors in Arkansas that part of his effort to kick the habit was writing letters to doctors who prescribed his pills.
“He was a flawed, but profoundly humble, kind and compassionate man with a magnificent generosity of spirit who loved those who suffered because he knew great suffering and loss,” Rosanne Cash said. “…He loved those who failed and made terrible mistakes, but who admitted to their God and themselves their failings because he himself owned the darkness he wrestled with his whole life.”
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, presided over Tuesday’s ceremony. Additional speakers included Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, as well as members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation — Sen. John Boozman, Rep. Steve Womack and Rep. Rick Crawford.
The Arkansas Advocate is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to tough, fair daily reporting and investigative journalism that holds public officials accountable and focuses on the relationship between the lives of Arkansans and public policy.
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