A Johnny Cash is set to be unveiled at the US Capitol later this year.
The late music icon is set to be honoured with the sculpture, which will be erected in Statuary Hall next month.
Designed and created by artist Kevin Kresse, the statue will be made of bronze and stand eight feet tall. It will be unveiled on September 24 in Emancipation Hall – becoming part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.
News of the forthcoming installation was announced yesterday (August 1) by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. It was also confirmed that the statue of Cash would mark the first time that a professional musician has received a statue at the capitol.
The decision to have the statue made comes after the Arkansas state legislature passed a bill back in 2019 – stating that existing statues of the state’s 18th governor James P. Clarke and 19th-century lawyer Uriah Rose would be replaced.
It was then decided that one of the replacements would be the ‘I Walk The Line’ singer, songwriter and guitarist, and the other would be civil rights leader Daisy Bates. The latter was installed back in May.
The sculptures of Clarke and Rose were taken down after increasing backlash circled them, namely because of Clarke’s 1894 proclamation calling for the Democratic Party to preserve “white standards”. Similarly, people took issue with the Rose sculpture due to their loyalty to the Confederacy during the Civil War (via Consequence).
The announcement of the statue comes shortly after Cash made headlines recently for the release of his posthumous album ‘Songwriter’ – an LP of previously unreleased songs by the late country music icon.
Arriving at the end of June, all tracks on the release were originally recorded by Cash back in early 1993 at the LSI Studios in Nashville, and many remained as demos.
One of the tracks included was called ‘Spotlight, which was reimagined for the album and saw contributions from The Black Keys‘ Dan Auerbach.
In other Johnny Cash news, Paul McCartney recently credited the country icon as the inspiration for him to form Wings.
“We were in bed one night, newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine. There they were, playing with some country musicians I had never heard of, looking like they were having fun,” he recalled.
“I thought: here’s Johnny, he’s back, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said: Do you want to form a band? And she went: ‘Sure.’ That’s how our relationship was. Do you want to go and live on a farm in Scotland? ‘Why not?’”
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