Taking place Aug. 4 in Jonesboro at Arkansas State University’s Convocation Center, the festival is a collaboration between the university and the Cash family with the intention of establishing it as an annual event. Other performers scheduled to appear include John Carter and Laura Cash, Tommy Cash, Dailey & Vincent, Gary Morris, Rodney Crowell and Chelsea Crowell. More artists are expected to be announced.
Arkansas State University is approximately an hour’s drive from Dyess, Arkansas, site of Cash’s boyhood home. Founded as a colony in 1934, Dyess was intended for poverty-stricken American farmers looking for a chance to work toward owning property. The Cash family moved there the following year.
“And that’s where I saw the Promised Land,” Cash wrote in the 1997 autobiography he penned with author Patrick Carr.
“A brand new house with two big bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a front porch and a back porch, an outside toilet, a barn, a chicken house, and a smokehouse. To me, luxuries untold. There was no running water, of course, and no electricity; none of us even dreamed of miracles like that.”
Proceeds will go to the restoration of Cash’s boyhood home as well establish a museum. For more information, visit the ASU website.