Hugs and smiles abounded when Johnny Cash’s heirs met July 16 with a team of Belmont University representatives for a “Mark the Moment” party at the institution’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business.
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The event celebrated an agreement that makes Belmont the permanent home for Cash’s personal archives. The collection of documents and some physical items is being organized and catalogued for access by researchers and scholars, to be housed in a Johnny Cash Learning Center at a university building under construction on Music Row.
As significant as the agreement was, the party’s timing had deep karmic repercussions. The event unwittingly coincided with the 40th anniversary of a dark chapter in Cash’s history: Some 40 years prior, he opened The Tennessean to see his photo plastered on the front page of the Living section with a headline he didn’t know was coming: “’Man in Black’ Without a Label.” After a 28-year run with Columbia Records, the company had dropped him without even a courtesy call.
