Knockin’ on Johnny Cash’s door

I pulled up in front of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home and couldn’t tell if anyone was home or not. A rusted old car sat in the gravel driveway, but the beaten-down wood frame shack, white with red trim around the windows, with a sloped roof jutting out over a small front porch, appeared empty. Johnny lived here from age three, in 1935, until graduating from high school in 1950. This is where he picked cotton, learned to play guitar and write songs, lost his brother Jack in a saw mill accident, listened to gospel music on the radio, and sang on a local radio station in high school

You pass just one other home on Arkansas West County Road 924 before reaching the Cash place. West County Road 924 is nothing more than a narrow dirt lane with potholes and mud puddles that just about swallowed up my tiny Ford Focus rental. Lined by tilting, wind-whipped wooden telephone poles and sagging wires, it cuts through miles of flat rice and bean farmland outside of Dyess, Arkansas, population 515, about 38 miles northwest of Memphis. The 2006 Cash biopic, “Walk the Line,” has overhead crane shots of young Johnny walking alone on barren and desolate 924. When I stopped by wearing a tweed jacket and tie after making sales calls in Memphis, the late afternoon chill, spitting rain and low clouds of November cast the bottomland in black and gray. A perfect day for the man in black.

In Philadelphia, where I’m from, you don’t just walk up to a stranger’s house and knock to see if anyone’s home. My internet research said the Cash place was owned and occupied by a William Stegall. Supposedly, he allows photographs for a donation, and there is a donation box out front so you don’t have to bother him.

I didn’t see any box as I slowly drove past, snapping photos from my open window. I did see a large hand-scrawled “Welcome” sign, which was enough encouragement for me to stop, take a chance, and knock on the front door.

“Come on in,” I was surprised to hear. Again, where I come from you don’t let strangers in your house, sight unseen. Let alone in the rural hinterlands at the isolated iconic home of one of the 20th century’s most influential musicians. Anyone from anywhere could be at the door. I pushed the creaking door open and there sat Willie in a recliner, watching a game show on a small TV with rabbit ears sitting on a stand.

I introduced myself and thanked him for inviting me in. The last thing I expected. Willie, short, on the hefty side, wearing several layers of worn t-shirts and sweaters and a day’s stubble of whiskers, said he’ll be 75 years old on April 14, 2010. He bought the Cash home “34 years ago, 35 in 2010, for $4,500,” he said, “from an old boy from Tupelo who got in trouble drinking, lost his wife, so he sold it to me. It’s home. It’s peaceful here, I enjoy it, but I’m getting’ old.”

I sat down on one of two ripped sofas in the living room. Willie’s cat jumped from one to the other. A rusted wood stove sat in the room, unused. The walls were peeling white-painted wooden planks with the wallpaper stripped away. A single bare bulb screwed into the ceiling cast a hard light on the wooden parquet floor.

“I just got in,” Willie said, motioning to the two electric heaters warming up. This was a world away from the “Blingdom” promoting Elvis’s Graceland on Memphis billboards.

“It’s nice meetin’ people,” said Willie. “I can’t keep up with ‘em all.” He had a way of immediately putting you at ease. “It’s better to be a good person than a mean person,” he said at one point. “People come from all over, across the water (the Atlantic Ocean), they know more about Johnny Cash than I do. Tour buses run out here from Memphis and Little Rock. One time a fella was selling bags of dirt from the yard for a dollar. The producer of that movie, he came in one time with Cuban cigars, said he wanted to sit around and get a feel for the place. Wanted me to show him how to pick cotton. Here, let me show you around.”

The kitchen sink was piled and jammed with a couple of week’s worth of dirty plates, pots and pans. The dining room table was piled with papers. Seven Cash children lived in this five-room house. Willie, walking with his cane, took me out back through sliding glass doors to show me where he planned to fix up a shed and clear out a small junkyard. That’s if he stays around. “I’ll have it fixed up by April if I’m still here,” he said. On Friday Willie said he was meeting with a banker from Little Rock who wanted to buy the property. “The state wants to buy it too, and pave the road. My ex-wife wants me to sell it. I want the cash in hand. You can’t believe half of what you hear.” Willie lives by himself. One of his sons comes over regularly to help him out. He still works, operating Caterpillar backhoes and excavators.

“I gotta quit,” he said. “But you get used to working and it’s hard to sit down and quit. You know what I mean.” I took it he was referring to my jacket and tie. “If they buy it, I might move to Wilson (a town to the east on the Mississippi River). Nice folks there. I don’t want a place in town. Want to be out where I’m by myself.”

Willie walked me out to the front yard and saw my mud-splattered Ford Focus parked down the road. “What’d ya park way down there for? You come back anytime. And park in the driveway, not way out there.”

I bounced along West County Road 924, looking at the empty land where Willie said “a lot of people just moved off,” thinking if I ever came back the road would be paved, Willie’s driveway too. There would be no pots and pans in the sink. The Cash place would be as clean as Elvis’s pristine birthplace in Tupelo. Thy “Blingdom” come.