Down in Dyess

My grandfather met Johnny Cash at the Illinois State Fair. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II and then mining coal for a while, Grandpa Elmer became an Illinois conservation officer. In August 1965, four years before he died, Elmer was assigned to work the state fair. Johnny Cash played on the grandstand.

After the show, Cash got intoxicated and volatile. The state troopers wanted to make sure the beloved performer didn’t get into any trouble. My grandfather had a reputation as a calm man who could talk anyone down, so his law enforcement buddies asked him to help handle Cash. Elmer spent the night hanging out with Cash in the hotel. Whenever Cash tried to go out and raise hell in the streets of Springfield, Elmer told him firmly: “Now Johnny, you don’t want to be doing that.”

In the spring of 2000, Elmer’s widow—my Grandma Frances—lay dying in a state hospital. While my mother was at Frances’s bedside, I spent the afternoons walking around their hometown of Stonington, Illinois. Surrounded by corn fields, the town was a change of pace for a fifteen-year-old Philadelphia kid, but I felt a connection to the place where generations of my family had lived, back when it was a booming coal town. It was at a Stonington yard sale that I bought my first Cash record, the famous live album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Fittingly, the album included a cover of Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” which describes coal mines where “the sun never shines.” The song provided a glimpse into the life of my grandfather and other men in my family.

Johnny Cash’s own hometown is mentioned at the end of Folsom Prison, as an announcer introduces his father: “He used to be, many years ago, a badland farmer down in Dyess, Arkansas, but he’s Johnny Cash’s daddy, Mr. Ray Cash.” Johnny’s childhood in Dyess has long been central to his mythos. Cash detailed in his 1997 autobiography how he worked in the family’s fields from the age of five; at eight, he graduated from carrying water to picking cotton.¹ This experience is dramatized in the 2005 biopic Walk the Line. Cash also writes about family cotton farming in songs like “Picking Time” and “Cotton Pickin’ Hands.”

A resettlement house in Dyess (Library of Congress).

Dyess was not just any Arkansas town; it was the Dyess Colony, one of dozens of federal projects designed to aid farmers who lost their livelihoods during the Great Depression. Established by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1934, the colony provided housing and farmland for 500 families. Tenants could eventually buy these properties at cost from the government. Johnny Cash quoted his father as saying:

We heard that we could buy twenty acres of land with no money down, and a house and barn, and they would give us a mule and a cow and furnish groceries through the first year until we had a crop and could pay it back…

The Cashes were one of 500 families who moved to the Dyess Colony.²

Dyess was by no means a kolhoz-style collective farming colony. Indeed, a contemporary account notes the socialist criticism that the model was based on a “doctrine of individualism.”³ Furthermore, Dyess Colony did not have the centralized, institutional look of other housing projects of the era, as houses were placed on individual farms and built in a wide variety of styles. The colony’s long-term goal was to provide the farmers with the opportunity needed to become self-sustaining landowners.⁴

Still, there were very strong collective aspects to the project. Although families worked their own plots of land, they also contributed (paid) labor to build community-owned projects, such as roads, schools, a hospital, a theatre, and a cafe. Funding for this construction came from the Works Progress Administration, while the Rural Electrification Administration established an electricity co-op. Farmers worked cooperatively to run the secondary enterprises needed to make their farms profitable, including a shared seed-cotton field, a cotton gin, and a canning plant. The farmers also pooled their cotton crops, giving them the leverage of a larger seller.⁵

Community canning at Dyess (Library of Congress).

“I grew up under socialism—kind of,” Cash writes in his autobiography. “Maybe a better word would be communalism.”⁶ With this distinction, Cash was perhaps looking for a way to value cooperative economic arrangements without endorsing the totalitarian communism of the Eastern Bloc. (He served as a U.S. Air Force radio intercept operator in West Germany during the early 1950s.)⁷ The term “cooperativism” might equally well apply to the Dyess project.

Considering the rightward trend of country music through the last half-century, it sounds odd to hear a mainstream country singer endorsing communal economic programs. In Cash’s youth, however, country musicians were behind the New Deal. Music historian Gregory Reish notes the popularity of songs such as “New Deal Blues” and “On to Victory, Mr. Roosevelt.” The conservatism of country music is not a given, as recent debates over the genre’s relationship to Black Lives Matter show.⁸

The Dyess Colony faced several setbacks over the years, including the 1937 flood portrayed in Cash’s song “Five Feet High and Rising,” and strong opposition from Arkansas’s governor. Some tenants protested against perceived mismanagement and unfair contracts. Eventually, the colony was dissolved along with other New Deal projects. Communal assets were sold off.⁹ Cash returned to Dyess in 1968 for a documentary; he reminisced about the colony, chatted with old neighbors, and walked through his now-vacant childhood home with his sisters. The music video for Cash’s final hit—a 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt”—includes scenes from this visit, forever linking Cash’s legacy with images of Dyess. After Cash’s death, the house was acquired by Arkansas State University and restored as the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home historic site.¹⁰

In its heyday, the Dyess project unquestionably had a positive impact on its cooperators. A 1939 study recorded high satisfaction with Dyess’s “school, health, and library systems.” The colony’s first farmer, Harve Smith, told a reporter in 1938: “It’s the best proposition a poor man ever had… Here, they’ve given a man a chance when it looked like no one else would.”¹¹

Only a certain type of poor man, however, was offered this proposition. In addition to economic requirements, an eligible farmer had to be (as one historian summarized) “under fifty, a resident of Arkansas, and a member of the white race.” Dyess was, after all, located in the Jim Crow South, and even New Deal programs outside the South were often racially exclusionary. Black workers were eligible for federal construction jobs in Dyess Colony, but they slept in segregated barracks and were ineligible to live in the community they helped build.¹²

The political uses of Cash and his music remain contested. In 1970, Richard Nixon attempted to frame a White House visit by Cash in support of the racist Southern strategy. Cash performed, but rejected the requested program. After a neo-nazi was filmed wearing a Cash tee-shirt at  the 2017 Unite the Right rally, Cash’s five children condemned the appropriation of their father’s image by white supremacists, describing Cash’s philosophy as “pacifism and inclusive patriotism.” In recent years, the prison abolition movement has rediscovered Cash’s advocacy and support for incarcerated people. In her podcast Prison Culture, the activist Mariame Kaba relates how he campaigned for reforms in the Arkansas state prison system, and even housed formerly-incarcerated men in his own home.¹³

Yet, it would be simplistic revisionism to claim Cash as a leftist figure. He is the songwriter who gave us “Man in Black,” where he speaks for the “poor and the beaten-down”—but he also wrote quasi-nationalist songs like “Ragged Old Flag.” Cash was a country star with his own biblically-rooted sense of justice, not an activist-troubadour in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips.¹⁴

The fact that Johnny Cash appeals to people in this country from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives is what makes a discussion of his New Deal roots relevant today. I am not alone in associating Cash’s music with closely-held ideas of family, home, tradition, and labor. It is easy to reduce our mythologized, hardscrabble, country histories to narratives of settler individualism. Cash’s story reminds us that cooperative enterprises and social support networks are an integral part of these histories.

Family cotton farms and thriving coal towns are not coming back. The models of the past cannot be resurrected from whole cloth, nor should they. As we work toward new, more just solutions—such as a Green New Deal—let us remember what Cash sang in “Man in Black”: “There’s things that never will be right, I know / And things need changing everywhere you go.” Nonetheless, we can “start to make a move to make a few things right.”

1. Johnny Cash and Patrick Carr, Cash: The Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1997), 37.
2. Dan W. Pittman, “The Founding of Dyess Colony,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 29 (1970): 317–18; Cash and Carr, Cash, 29.
3. Henry Smith, “Southern Travel Diary,” Southwest Review 24 (1938): 84.
4. Pittman, “Founding of Dyess Colony,” 317–18.
5. Ibid., 320–23.
6. Cash and Carr, Cash, 30–31. Cash’s language should not be mistaken with the confederation-based “communalism” advocated by philosopher Murray Bookchin.
7. Ibid., 103-6.
8. Gregory N. Reish, “The NRA Blues: Commercial Country Music and the New Deal,” in Mark Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 24–47; Ann Powers, “Tyler Childers Pushes Back on Southern Values and Our ‘Long, Violent History,” NPR, Sept. 18, 2020.
9. Donald Holley, “Trouble in Paradise: Dyess Colony and Arkansas Politics,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (1973): 203–16.
10. Johnny Cash! The Man, His World, His Music, dir. Robert Elfstrom (Verité, 1969); “Cash Home Restoration Timeline,” Historic Dyess Colony: Johnny Cash Boyhood Home, accessed April 21, 2021.
11. Charles P. Loomis and Dwight Davidson, “Sociometrics and the Study of New Rural Communities,” Sociometry 2 (1939): 60; Pittman, “Founding of Dyess Colony,” 324.
12. Pittman, “Founding of Dyess Colony,” 317, 320 (quotation). For a succinct discussion of the exclusions and inclusions of African Americans in New Deal programs, see Adolph Reed Jr., “Race and the New Deal Coalition,” The Nation, June 29, 2015.
13. Mark Allan Jackson, “Introduction: Richard Nixon, Johnny Cash, and the Political Soul of Country Music” in Jackson, ed., Honky Tonk on the Left, 1–23; Roseanne Cash, “A message from the children of Johnny Cash,” Facebook, Aug. 16, 2017; Mariame Kaba, “Johnny Cash, Prison Reformer, Part 1” and “Johnny Cash, Prison Reformer, Part 2,” Prison Culture, March 29–30, 2016.
14. For a discussion of Cash’s shifting political framing over the course of his career, see Jonathan Silverman, “The Politics of Covers: Johnny Cash, Rick Rubin, and the American Recordings,” in Jackson, ed., Honky Tonk on the Left, 276–96.