LITTLE ROCK — In August 2011, the first Johnny Cash Music Festival was held at Arkansas State University, attracting thousands of fans and scores of musicians who performed to honor one of Arkansas’ most famous native sons. The crowd was also there to kick off awareness and fundraising for the restoration of Cash’s boyhood home and other historic properties in nearby Dyess.
And after only one year, the American Bus Association, a tourism trade group, named the festival as one of only two Arkansas events to make the 2013 Top Events in North America (with Little Rock’s Riverfest the other Arkansas choice). The association also selected the tribute to Cash as one of its “Events to Watch,” a new offering this year.
Fourteen months after its debut, the festival has a new time schedule: early October, and it will be during a weekend, when a year ago, the event was held on a Thursday.
ROSEANNE
“We wanted to have it during the school year, so the college students would be more likely to be able to attend,” Cash’s daughter Rosanne Cash, says. “Last year, it was filmed by the Public Broadcasting Service folks, and they’re not doing it this year, so it will be different, in that they had us repeat some stuff last year, and they had cameras and wiring everywhere.”
Cash, 57, lives in New York and has her own career, recording and writing, and is appreciative of the efforts of ASU to preserve her family’s heritage. Her father’s old home is being saved/ restored/rebuilt to museumlike condition, and Cash and her sisters have been putting aside some of the Cash papers and personal effects for the eventual museum.
“I think my dad would also feel committed to it,” she says. “I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to go in that house, but that day is coming. I visited the site in February to see how it was coming. There has to be a lot done as far as the foundation before the rest of the work can begin.”
WILLY
Willie Nelson, 79, the Cash festival headliner, played Sept. 22 at the 27th annual Farm-Aid in Hershey, Pa., before a sellout crowd of 29,000. Nelson co-founded Farm-Aid with Neil Young, John Mellencamp, who also headlined the show, along with fellow board director Dave Matthews. Nelson had been hospitalized in August in Denver for one night, and had to cancel a show there, later attributing the rare cancellation to altitude problems. Nelson has announced a new memoir, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, due out Nov. 13 from publishers William Morrow. A news release says the book will include “never before-heard stories about his life, family, music, politics, Texas, religion and favorite recreational activity.”
Nelson played in a group, The Highwaymen, with Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, from 1985 to 1995. The foursome performed in Barton Coliseum in 1991 at a benefit for survivors of southwest Arkansas flooding that year.
DIERKS
Dierks Bentley, one of the new young “country hunks,” has performed frequently in Arkansas, most recently in a May concert that had to be moved from the Riverfest Amphitheatre to Verizon Arena, due to inclement weather. Bentley’s first name recalls his grandfather Fred Dierks and his role in founding the southwest Arkansas lumber company and town of that name.
Though Bentley never met Johnny Cash, he feels a kinship to The Man in Black, if only from watching many hours of the tapes of TV’s The Johnny Cash Show, when one of Bentley’s early jobs had him working at The Nashville Network in the station’s vast archives of country music history.
“(Cash) was a real revolutionary for his time,” Bentley says, “and as far from being a traditionalist as you could get. I’ve sung what must be his most famous song, ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ more times than I could ever count. I hope maybe I can get to do a duet with Rosanne Cash on one of those songs her dad had recommended to her when she was 18.”
Bentley has had three consecutive No. 1 hit singles: “Am I the Only One,” “Home” and “5-1-5-0,” and he was recently nominated by the Country Music Association for Single and Album of the Year awards.
THE CIVIL WARS
The Civil Wars, despite their historic-sounding name, are a recently formed duo consisting of Californian Joy Williams and Alabama native John Paul White, who met in Nashville, Tenn., at a “writing camp” where they found a musical chemistry that has since transformed them into virtual overnight stardom. In June2009, they released a free digital album, Live at Eddie’s Attic, recorded at a Georgia bar, which was only the second time they had performed professionally together. The set included eight originals and a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.”
The Civil Wars’ most renowned song, “Poison and Wine,’” propelled them to fame when it was used in its entirety in a dramatic moment during the ABC drama, Grey’s Anatomy. The song was later used in another TV show, The Vampire Diaries. In 2011, the couple - who are a couple only in the professional sense, despite the personal nature of some of their songs - released their first full-length CD, Barton Hollow.
In February, The Civil Wars won two Grammy Awards for the album in the categories Best Folk Album and Best Country Duo or Group Performance.They have since been nominated by the Country Music Association as Vocal Duo of the Year and Musical Event of the Year (for their recording of “Safe & Sound” with Taylor Swift.) The CMA awards show is Nov. 1.
JOHNNY
For more information about the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home Project, the Historic Dyess Colony Master Plan or the festival, see the website johnnycashmusicfest.com or call the Arkansas Heritage Sites Office at ASU at (888) 225-8343 or (870) 972-2803.
Ruth Hawkins, ASU’s director of Heritage Sites, heads the restoration project, determined to preserve that vanishing world before it is completely eradicated.
At an ASU news conference when the 2011 festival was first announced, Rosanne Cash said, “There’s a real need for authenticity now. And everything about this is authentic. It’s authentically real, it’s a part of my family, it’s my dad’s history, it’s where the music came from and it will be here now forever.”
For those interested in seeing the old Cash home place, it’s at 4791 W. County Road 924, outside Dyess on a dusty road in the midst of cotton fields.
Johnny Cash Music Festival
Rosanne Cash, Willie Nelson, Dierks Bentley, The Civil Wars
7 p.m. Friday, Arkansas State University Convocation Center, 217 Olympic Drive, Jonesboro
Tickets:
$81, $43.50, reserved seating
(870) 972-2781, (888) 278-3267
tickets.astate.edu
johnnycashmusicfest.com
Style, Pages 27 on 10/02/2012