Ray and Carrie Cash moved to Arkansas when they took an offer to farm government land for poor and impoverished farmers.

Growing up picking cotton and working on the farm influenced some of Johnny Cash's songs in the future, one of them being "Pickin' Time."

In March 1935, when American musician Johnny Cash was three years old, the family settled in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal colony of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

[3] The colony was named after William Reynolds Dyess, a Mississippi native, and the first Arkansas WPA administrator.

Dyess gave the idea of supplying farms to families in poverty to Harry Hopkins, and then named the first "Colonization Project No 1."

Along with natural disasters and the Great Depression, the Cash family experienced a horrific personal tragedy when on May 20, 1944, Johnny's older brother, 14-year-old Jack Cash, was mortally wounded when he fell into a table saw at work, he would die in the hospital a week later.

Ev'ry night when I go to bed I thank the Lord that my kids are fed They live on beans eight days and nine But I get 'em fat come pickin' time Get 'em fat come come pickin' timeThe family farm was flooded on at least two occasions, which inspired his song "Five Feet High and Rising".