In May, a statue modeled after civil rights icon Daisy Gatson Bates debuted at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Now, it’s country legend and Kingsland native Johnny Cash’s turn.
In September, a sculpture of the Man in Black — crafted by Central Arkansas artist Kevin Kresse — will join Bates’ likeness in the National Statuary Hall Collection, where each state in the country is given space for two statues honoring esteemed natives. More details about any local celebrations as well as the official unveiling ceremony at Emancipation Hall, which will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 11 a.m. (Eastern time), have yet to be announced.
Cash hardly needs an introduction, but his significant Arkansas roots bear repeating. Sometimes, the state where a celebrity is born claims them confidently, without much regard for the fact that they barely lived there at all. That’s not the case for Cash, who spent the first 18 years of his life in Arkansas, and ages 3-18 on the same 40-acre plot in Dyess.
From 1935-1950, Cash resided with his parents and many siblings in the Dyess Colony, a 500-plot agriculture development launched in the early ’30s as a New Deal effort to jumpstart the lives of Great Depression families. His boyhood digs, meticulously restored by Arkansas State University, were opened to the public in 2014 and are unquestionably worth a visit. Also of note: “Songwriter,” Cash’s most recent posthumous album, contains perhaps his most Arkansan cut of all time, “Have You Ever Been to Little Rock?”
Kresse has been at work on his statue of Cash for several years. When Times writer Stephanie Smittle wrote at length about Kresse’s process for a March 2022 cover story, she described the mammoth sculpture as “an 8-foot, 1,200-pound Johnny Cash in bronze, with a Martin D-35 acoustic guitar strapped to his back and a Bible in his right hand. Or, as Kresse put it, ‘the thing that took him around the world, and the thing that got him through it all.’” Here’s a bit more from Smittle about the inspiration behind the statue:
For Kresse, though, the statue’s concept draws from another Cash moment, albeit an imagined one. “The dream sequence that this is coming from, for me, was after having been to the festival in Dyess when they set the stage up next to that boyhood home. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if he was playing that festival? And hadn’t seen the house redone and refinished? And coming through the house and reliving everything and then coming out onto the porch getting ready to play and pausing and reflecting on everything. The fields. His growing up there. His losing his brother there. … So if I can have that in mind, I know whether I’m hitting the right tone.”
Previously, Arkansas’s two statues at the Capitol were of lawyer Uriah Milton Rose and James Paul Clarke, a former governor and senator, whose respective legacies are marred by pro-Confederacy and white supremacist beliefs.
In 2019, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed into law a bill that would replace the Rose and Clarke likenesses, which individually joined the collection in 1917 and 1921 and were both removed in early April, with statues of Bates and Cash. Hutchinson’s stated rationale for the change was “to update the statues with representatives of our more recent history.”
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