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.”
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