With its white leather sofas, fake fur upholstery and green shag-pile carpet that lines even the ceiling of the legendary “Jungle Room”, nobody could accuse Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland, of being in good taste. But it certainly pulls the crowds: more than 600,000 visitors flock to the Memphis mansion every year.
Fifty miles away, across the Mississippi river in Arkansas, a beat-up, Depression-era farming community is hoping to emulate that success. The starting point for the tiny settlement of Dyess’s ambitions could not be further from Elvis’s opulent home – a delapidated, single-storey wooden farmstead, located along a dirt road on the edge of town.
But it has a secret ingredient: a music legend of its own. Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, spent his childhood in that house, living in Dyess from 1934 through to the 50s. Now, nearly a decade after his death, Cash’s family home is being returned to its original state as the anchor attraction of a $10m tourist project on the back of the singer’s global celebrity.
Read more at The Guardian.
Johnny Cash’s senior portrait identifying him as the vice-president of the Dyess high school class of 1950 has hung for years in city hall. Photograph: Tim Rand/AP