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## A Boy From Arkansas Cotton Fields
John R. Cash was born on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas, the fourth of seven children of Ray and Carrie Rivers Cash. The family moved to Dyess, Arkansas, when he was three years old, relocated there under a New Deal resettlement program that placed poor farming families on land they could work. The Cash family grew cotton.
He worked the fields as a child. This is not a biographical detail intended to establish hardship credentials; it is relevant to what kind of artist he became. The experience of physical labor, of marginal economics, of a life defined by the specifics of a particular American region at a particular economic moment — these shaped not just the content of his songs but the register in which he sang them. When Cash sang about poverty and hard work, he was not performing a character. He had been that character.
His older brother Jack died in 1944, when Cash was twelve, in an accident with a table saw at the school shop. Jack had been the religious one — his stated ambition was to become a minister — and his death left a mark on his younger brother that never fully healed. Cash spoke of Jack throughout his life, attributing his own religious convictions partly to the influence of a brother he lost too early.
Gospel music was the first music Cash knew seriously. His mother played guitar and sang hymns. He absorbed the shape-note singing tradition of the rural South, the specific sonic vocabulary of Christian music as practiced by working people in Arkansas churches. That vocabulary never left him, not through the rockabilly years at Sun Records or the mainstream country years at Columbia or the drug-hazed worst years of the 1960s. It was always in the music somewhere, the structure under the surface.