The Tragic, Real-Life Story Of Johnny Cash

Publish date: 2024-05-04

Johnny Cash was the fourth of seven children, born February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Ark. to Ray and Carrie Cash. In his memoir, Johnny Cash: The Autobiography, Cash recalled that the house in which he was born "didn't have any windows; in winter my mother hung blankets or whatever she could find." The Depression hit the Cash family hard, but when Johnny, who was actually named J.R., was three years old, they moved to the Dyess Colony in northeast Arkansas, taking part in a federal farming program in which the family farmed 20 acres of cotton and other crops. When he was five, Johnny started working in the fields alongside his parents and siblings.

He started at first as a water boy, carrying drinking water out to his family. By the time he was eight, he was picking cotton with them, dragging a heavy canvas sack that started empty, but by the end of the day held 200 or more pounds of cotton. "It wasn't complicated," Cash noted in his memoir. "You just parked the wagon at one end of the rows and went to it." He said the work was exhausting and painful; he had back pain, even as a child, and the cotton bolls he picked were sharp, which cut his hands. "[W]e just worked and worked and worked," he remembered.

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