Belmont’s Johnny Cash Archives: A Resilient Moment to Start a New Chapter

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.

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.

Just 11 months earlier, his bedrock tone had provided the final voice in “Highwayman,” taking him to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs along with super-group band mates Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.

Four decades after he was unceremoniously dismissed, Belmont’s acquisition will place a part of his legacy in the heart of Music Row, literally across the property line from where that decision was made. The new Belmont building is adjacent to a Curb College building that previously housed Columbia. Two recording studios still exist on the property, including the space in which Cash cut some of his most iconic hits: “Ring of Fire,” “What is Truth,” “Man in Black” and the June Carter duet “Jackson.”

“It’s literally almost a phoenix rising from the ashes,” says Dr. Mary Ellen Pethel, director of the Learning Center. “They’re blasting right now, and that new building is going to complement those historic studios. It’s like a reunion of sorts, and it’s like all is right with the world again.”

The $8.6 million acquisition occurred in part through support from Scott and Sandi Borchetta, Mike and Linda Curb and the Harper House Music Foundation, a nonprofit involved in the preservation and/or funding of music venues, education programs and other heritage projects.

The Cash children — Rosanne Cash, John Carter Cash, Kathy Cash, Cindy Cash and Tara Cash Schwoebel — had wanted their father’s history to be preserved in a place where it could be mined for scholarly research and music-related study. Belmont became a partner, Pethel says, through a relationship Curb College dean Brittany Schaffer had with the Cash team. Following the July 22 announcement of the deal, Belmont has already fielded requests to explore the collection, though the school is hardly ready for that step.

“People want to come research now,” Pethel says, “and I’m like, ‘They’re still in banker’s boxes.’”

The collection includes more than 100 of those boxes, the bulk of it consisting of paperwork and documents, such as correspondence, contracts, photos, datebooks, scrapbooks and legal papers.

The boxes also hold VHS tapes and CDs, plus clothing worn by attendees at a Cash fan club meeting and hermetically-sealed cotton from the Cash farm in Arkansas. The Belmont team is still in the beginning stages of taking stock.

“It’s got a few of what you would call ephemeral things, or memorabilia,” Pethel says. “No guitars.”

In addition to providing a source for research, the deal creates a learning experience for some music nerds in training as Pethel has assembled a dozen students to assist in cataloguing and filing the materials. The students were picked because of their interests in legal studies, history or songwriting, for example. They’ll be part of a process expected to take 12-24 months as they develop and implement a metadata program. That sounds basic, but marking names or titles consistently (June Carter vs. June Carter Cash, “Folsom Prison” vs. “Folsom Prison Blues”) will affect scholars’ ability to know what’s in the collection and how to access it.

“Smart is cool for this class,” Pethel says. “That’s for sure.”

Pethel is particularly appreciative of the geographic significance of the Johnny Cash Learning Center. She founded Nashville Sites, an enterprise that provides walking, driving and virtual tours of Music City, including themed journeys that focus on music properties, the city’s Civil War locations and its Civil Rights history. She believes it could lead to Cash-related tours.

The acquisition comes at a key time as Belmont extends its influence on the Nashville music community. The new building, announced in April 2024, is on a block of Music Row that includes Black River, Soundstage and BMG Music, putting students within easy walking distance from the American Federation of Musicians, Warner Records Nashville, BMI, ASCAP and the Country Music Association, where Schaffer will become CEO on Jan. 1.

The new structure will feature songwriter rooms and a 150-capacity performance space, among other accommodations, making the school more interactive with a music community that already counts scores of Belmont grads among its work force.

And it comes after the 2025 introduction of Dolly U, a course of study that explores numerous entertainment-related disciplines through projects based around the career of Dolly Parton. Cash and Parton provide a template, though unintended, for other Nashville music icons to consider as they map out their legacies.

“They’re completely separate [projects], and there’s no larger plan, no master plan with this,” Pethel says. “At the same time, having the Dolly U programming and then acquiring the Johnny Cash Archives certainly plants a flag for Belmont in terms of its ability to celebrate and honor these musical icons, and do so in a way that passes scholarship from one generation to the next.”

It’s a remarkable reversal of fortune in the center of Music Row.