Johnny Cash statue dedicated

of you were here M any last spring when we unveiled Daisy Bates’ statue. I’m glad we’re here again to tell Arkansas’ story.

Many of you know that I grew up in politics. But what you may not know is that I also grew up in a musical family.

To us – and to just about every other musical family in the South – after God and country came Johnny Cash. Even more than his songs, it’s the image of the man that I remember: the slickedback hair of his early albums, the seasoned look of his later years.

Perhaps the most iconic: the pictures of Cash at San Quentin and Folsom prisons.

Not long ago, my husband and I hosted another Arkansas musician, Zach Williams, at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Zach shares some biographical notes with Cash: he too was raised in the Arkansas Delta. He too got his start in rock music before falling into drugs and alcohol.

He too found Jesus, quit using, and started writing Christian music. He too now performs in prisons. Zach shared his experience performing with us: looking out in the crowd, seeing inmates with tattoos on their faces and necks. His thought wasn’t, “how am I different from them.” It was, “I could be sitting right there.”

Obviously, there are some differences between Zach and Johnny Cash. When Cash visited Folsom Prison, his most famous line was all Man in Black bravado: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

But Johnny Cash also used to say that he was two people: “Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble.” It’s not hard to imagine that he too looked out into that prison crowd and saw a version of himself staring back.

Johnny Cash was open about both the struggles and triumphs in his life. He was a hymn-singing Christian. But there were also times when he wrote that he felt like a “walking vision of death.”

That didn’t contradict his image: it was his image. Cash’s first big hit was called “I Walk the Line.” In an era when most musicians’ images were carefully curated, he was open about straddling the border between cleancut Johnny and cast-down Cash.

When so much in today’s world is fake, Johnny Cash was real.

Not long ago, I toured Cash’s childhood home in Dyess, Arkansas. I saw the cramped rooms where his parents raised their seven kids. I saw the fields where Johnny and his family worked, picking cotton and singing church music.

It was an unspectacular childhood, the same as thousands of other kids in thousands of other little farmhouses in the Delta.

But it’s what makes Johnny Cash special. Millions of Americans could look at him, look at his career, look at his success, and still say, “he’s one of us.”

Johnny Cash walked the line. It wasn’t a straight line. It was like the Arkansas River: jagged, but always moving forward.

We’re a nation of second chances, of constant reinvention, of continuous redemption. Where a singer can start in the cotton fields and eventually perform to stadiums. Where a Christian baptized in the Tyronza River can headline a Billy Graham Crusade.

Where a man can defeat his own demons and become a vessel for the Holy Spirit.

Johnny Cash was an ordinary man and a superstar, all in one. It’s a story that could only happen in America. And it’s a story that Arkansas – the land of pioneers and patriots – is proud to tell.

May God bless Johnny Cash, and may God bless the great State of Arkansas.

Gov. Sarah Sanders