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Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash by Colin Edward Woodward (review)

2023; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2023.a903244

2325-6893

Brian Dempsey,

Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Reviewed by: Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash by Colin Edward Woodward Brian Dempsey Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash. By Colin Edward Woodward. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. Pp. x, 351. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-208-5 In 2011, a simple Depression-era home on the outskirts of Dyess, Arkansas, found a new owner. After years of negotiation, Arkansas State University [End Page 614] acquired Johnny Cash's boyhood home, establishing an interpretive site in the rich gumbo of the Delta soil that nourished Cash in his formative years. In Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash, Colin Edward Woodward argues that the connection between Cash and his native Arkansas deserves far more scholarly attention than it has received in the past. He contends that Arkansas germinated the seed of Cash's genius and served as a lifelong anchor as he navigated the twists and turns of an iconic career. Woodward follows the Cash family from its early beginnings in seventeenth-century Scotland, across the Atlantic to Virginia and Georgia, and finally to Arkansas on the eve of the Civil War. In Arkansas, the Cashes eked out a living as farmers and preachers, struggling to make their way in the postwar South. Ray Cash, Johnny's father, served in France during World War I and returned to Kingsland, Arkansas, in 1919 with very few prospects. In 1935, he moved his family northeast to an upstart New Deal colony town called Dyess. Johnny Cash was three years old at the time, and, as Woodward explains, Kingsland and Dyess were forever etched in his bones. Later in life, Cash returned to both towns to perform and to attend reunions. The Dyess Colony was a New Deal project funded by the Works Progress Administration that provided farmers access to land and a livelihood during the Great Depression. The Cash family benefited from this social experiment and eventually came to own their modest house surrounded by cotton fields. It was in Dyess that Johnny Cash's older brother Jack Dempsey Cash was tragically killed in a lumber mill accident that left his younger brother devastated and his father Ray bitter and angry. Woodward interprets these and later episodes through a wide lens, weaving regional and national histories into Johnny's life. We learn that young Cash was precocious, talented, searching, and interested in history, and that he absorbed a powerful creative energy from his family and physical surroundings. While such scaffolding is susceptible to hagiography, for the most part Woodward effectively confronts Cash's many complexities as he frames his argument about the musician's roots. For example, Woodward mines correspondence between Cash and his future first wife, Vivian Liberto, to reveal Cash's early racism. Describing the all-white town of Dyess as "unusual in its racism," Woodward highlights a 1953 letter Cash wrote from Germany while serving in the air force, in which he used racist slurs to relate a drunken encounter with a Black man (p. 58). Cash later apologized to Liberto, and his attitudes about race evolved throughout his life. Yet he still grappled with the thick residues of growing up in the Jim Crow South, and in Dyess in particular. Woodward grounds Cash firmly within scholarly sources and wider historical contexts, focusing on Cash's humanity, his failures and successes as a husband and father, his drug abuse, and his important contributions to prison reform and Native American social justice. Throughout, Woodward keeps Cash grounded as he surveys the artist's recording career in Memphis, his move to California, and his life on the outskirts of Nashville. Woodward's musical analysis is particularly strong throughout the book. He argues that Cash's religious output should be taken as seriously as his famous secular work, citing Cash's frequent invocation of the sublime as proof of his enduring connection to his Arkansas home. [End Page 615] Cash's American Recordings series, released both before and after his death in 2003, marked a return to artistic form—a style Woodward defines as authentic, honest, and imbued with the grandeur, pathos, and complexity of the American experience. Most critics and fans tend to agree with...