FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
September 30, 2003
Contact:  Marie DesOrmeaux
(202) 225-3772
 
House Passes Ross Bill to Honor Johnny Cash
 
(Washington, D.C.) Fourth District Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) paid tribute Tuesday to one of his district’s most famous natives, Johnny Cash, with a statement on the floor of the House of Representatives as the House considered H.Con.Res.282, Honoring the life of Johnny Cash.  The late country singer was born in Kingsland in 1932. 

Ross offered the bill along with Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who represents Nashville, the heart of the country music industry.  The House passed the bill unanimously.  Ross’s floor statement is as follows:

“I rise today to pay tribute to the late Johnny Cash, one of our most well known singer/songwriters who was born in a little-known town in my district named Kingsland. 

“Kingsland, Arkansas is a little town of 449 residents that lies just west of the Mississippi Delta, the fertile ground out of which grows our nation’s finest food and fiber.  Out of this land also grows much hardship – it is sparsely populated by farmers whose fortune is subject to the whims of nature.  It gave birth to the blues, and to Johnny Cash.

“Cash was born in the wake of the Great Depression, the fourth of five children in a cotton farming family.  He picked cotton with his hands, sang hymns at the Central Baptist Church, and sought higher ground at Pine Bluff when the great flood of 1937 sent the Mississippi’s waters spilling into his family’s cotton fields in Dyess, covering them with black Mississippi mud that the next year produced the best cotton crop they’d ever seen – hardship and glory wrapped up in a busted levee that soaked his livelihood and sealed his fate as the champion of the downtrodden.

“Johnny Cash’s music transcended genres and generations to touch us all with stories of struggle – sometimes ending in triumph, but usually ending in trouble.  His adventurous ballads and lamenting dirges could bring us down to the darkest depths of life at the same time his spirituals lifted us up to heaven. 

“He was bold.  He was bad.  He was brave.  He made his peace with man and with God through his songs.  He sang of outlaws and heroes, cowboys and killers, soldiers and lovers, and even a boy named Sue. He was country, folk, and rock and roll.  Johnny Cash didn’t sing to simply earn a living, he sang because he had much to tell.

“From his life we learn to face adversity with wit and integrity, to fight back when pushed down, to hold duty and honor sacred, and to love and forgive.  We lost one of our national treasures this month, but the legacy and the legend of the Man in Black will live on in the gift he gave us all.”


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