The Capitol Building Is Getting a Johnny Cash Statue

It’s not every day that Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries — the heads of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the House of Representatives — can find common ground, but there are some occasions that merit exactly that. One such occasion involves a musical icon whose image will soon take up residence in the U.S. Capitol Building. Specifically, Johnny Cash, who — NBC News reports — Johnson and Jeffries jointly announced would be immortalized there before year’s end.

As NBC’s Minyvonne Burke wrote, the statue of Cash will — along with a statue of Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist who worked to desegregate schools in Little Rock — take the place of two older statues of famous Arkansas residents. The statue of Bates was installed in May, while the Cash statue is set to make its debut in the Capitol in September of this year.

More specifically, the statues of Bates and Cash will replace statues of Uriah Rose and James P. Clarke, both of whom held troubling views including support for the Confederacy and outright racism. The bill to replace their statues passed in 2019, though, as Arkansas Times wrote at the time, there was some controversy over Cash’s inclusion, with some support for Walmart founder Bill Walton being memorialized instead.

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Tributes to Cash have cropped up in unexpected places in recent years. MLS team Nashville SC unveiled a Cash-inspired kit last year, and a new collection of 1990s recordings, Songwriter, was released earlier this year. Reviews of the aforementioned album have been positive, with AllMusic’s James Wilkinson calling it “an unexpected gem.” At Pitchfork, Stephen Thomas Erlewine observed that “Songwriter is mostly a testament to the sturdiness of [Cash’s] craft.” And soon, visitors to the Capitol will be reminded of Cash’s contributions to the state of Arkansas and the world.