HOME IS WHERE HIS HEART WAS: The producers and cast of a new musical production, The Cash Legacy: A Musical Salute to the Man in Black, by Studio Tenn near Nashville, visited Johnny Cash's restored childhood home in Dyess on a quest to understand the man behind the music.
The show, produced by a live theater group in Franklin, near Nashville, follows a musical revue format similar to Smokey Joe's Cafe, which features 39 songs and no dialogue. The producers describe the Cash show as blurring the lines between musical theater and a concert experience. The show opened Thursday and runs through March 6 at The Factory at Franklin.
About six months ago, the theater's leaders, including artistic director Matt Logan, visited the home in Dyess.
"I've always been a huge Johnny Cash fan," explains Logan in a video shot by Arkansas State University in front of the home. "But his niece Rhonda [Ponessa] told me, 'To go further, you have to know the man, you can't just know what everybody knows, you need to know what made him tick, what made him grounded, and what was the underlying personality underneath all the fame, all the music, everything.
"You have to go to the boyhood home in Dyess to understand him and to really know the person that never left him,'" Logan said of Ponessa's urging him to visit Dyess.
"We found it to be one of the best inspirations we could have," Logan said of his initial visit and a return one with the cast (including Mel Tillis' daughter Carrie) and Ponessa. To see videos of Carrie Tillis and the cast performing "I Still Miss Someone" on Johnny's front porch and "Busted" inside his living room, visit Studio Tenn's Facebook page.
THE WRITE STUFF: A recent issue of Garrison Keillor's e-newsletter, "The Writer's Almanac," spotlighted novelist Richard Ford, who spent much of his childhood in Jackson, Miss., and Little Rock, where his grandmother and her second husband ran a hotel. The feature also chronicled Ford's friendship later in life with acclaimed writer and fellow Jackson resident Eudora Welty, who died in 2001. Ford served as a pallbearer at Welty's funeral and was her literary executor. Ford also co-edited Welty's collected writings for volumes published by Library of America.
QUIZZICAL RESULTS: BrainFall, a leading interactive media company that produces viral content and interactive quizzes, recently asked its users to take a "How Many Shades of Grey Are You?" quiz. The quiz posed 10 questions to 120,000 people from across the nation and Washington, D.C. Participants rated how adventurous (or not) they were in their personal lives. The two states that tied as the kinkiest? Arkansas and Nebraska -- seriously? -- followed by South Carolina, Nevada and Mississippi. According to BrainFall, the most innocent responders were from Hawaii, Alaska, Maine, Idaho and Washington, D.C. Go figure.
Contact Linda S. Haymes at (501) 399-3636 or lhaymes@arkansasonline.com
SundayMonday on 02/22/2015