Legacy Memphis Johnny Cash Statue Project

In December, 1954, John R. Cash, Marshall Grant, and Luther Perkins stepped into the Galloway Methodist Church on the corner of Cooper and Walker streets in Memphis, Tennessee, to play their first performance together for the Pioneers Club, a ladies church function.

And the rest, they say, is music history.

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two would go on to take the world by storm, but it all began there in the Cooper-Young community in Memphis.

Memphis  is full of such stories and locations like the Galloway Church (now rechristned "Galloway House") and the neighborhoods which contain them. These neighborhoods are crucial - yet unrecognized - pieces of the Memphis music narrative, because in Memphis, every neighborhood has a hero. 

Legacy Memphis aims to address this by working with neighborhoods to celebrate their own unique pieces of the story, beginning with the Johnny Cash Statue Project in the historic Cooper-Young community.

With your donation, you will help Legacy Memphis in supporting this project and bringing Johnny Cash back to Memphis!

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To celebrate, enhance, and educate our neighborhoods about Memphis heroes. Legacy Memphis will involve artists, landscapers, and architects to create sculpture gardens based on Memphis music history for locals and tourists. 

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Your contribution will go toward creating the lifesize bronze of Johnny Cash which will take a little over a year to complete. A second "ask" of around 25-30K will then happen for the plaza and walkway.

We have already secured the rights from all necessary estates. The statue will be modelled after the Johnny Cash pose taken from a photograph made by Leigh Wiener in 1962. Local historian Jimmy Ogle will collaborate with historians Mike Freeman and Jim Cole as well as John Bass from the Mike Curb Foundation to create the Historic Marker describing Cash's first performance at the Church. 

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Legacy Memphis hopes to organize and establish community support behind a series of statues throughout the City of Memphis honoring our musical and artistic legacy. These statues will invite visitors into historic neighborhoods and park vicinities near historic recording studios such as Sun, Stax, Ardent, and Royal. Legacy Memphis would utilize planning and design that would show city pride, gain national attention, seize economic opportunities, and present more reasons for people to visit Memphis. People will want to live in a city that honors it's own rich musical and artistic legacy.

A lifesize bronze statue of Johnny Cash will be created based on a photograph made by Leigh Wiener in 1962 and will be completed and mounted into place in Cooper-Young by 2018, based on current estimates. Local historian Jimmy Ogle will install the Historic Marker in 2016 at Galloway Church describing Cash's first performance there. We have secured the rights from all necessary estates.

Raise money to create a Johnny Cash Statue, unveil the Historic Marker on May 1st, 2016 (the 60th anniversary of the release of  the Sun Records single "I Walk The Line"), and announce the progress and/or completion of the fundraiser, with the goal of creating the sculpture which should take approximately one year or less. While the statue is created, architect Bemis Atkins will design and oversee the landscaping of an area for which the statue will be mounted completed.