Excerpt
Chapter 1: I AM BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND
THE 1930S HAD NOT BEEN KIND to the once-mighty American farmer. Ravaged by the Great Depression, those charged with growing food and raw materials for the rest of the country (and the rest of the world) were just as down and out as the next guy. Prices plunged, money disappeared, and countless acres were dying. But when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped in with his New Deal, Ray Cash was all ears. What interested the World War I veteran and struggling family man most was Roosevelts Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Under its auspices, folks were relocated to government-purchased land they could pay back over time with crop proceeds. And if selected, theyd receive a barn and a mule to work the twenty-acre plots.
Certainly sounded like a dealespecially in the face of all the obstacles facing the elder Cash. My father rode the rails looking for work of any kind, anywhere to make a few dollars to feed us on, Johnny Cash wrote in the liner notes of his Grammy-winning 1996 album, Unchained. We lived by [the] railroad track that I rode with my uncle on at the age of three. When my father had exhausted every effort to find work near home, hed hop a freight going anywhere if the doors were empty on the boxcars. Hed come back the same way, days or weeks later, jumping off in front of our house, as the train slowed down to stop in Kingsland.