Storyteller's Museum opens at Johnny Cash Tennessee Farm

40 miles out of the city

Johnny Cash’s beloved home and personal concert venue have been transformed into the ultimate tribute to the Man in Black. One of Nashville’s many charms is that it’s awash in music history at seemingly every turn. From the Grand Ole Opry to Ryman Auditorium, the city is proud of its country music heritage —and the legendary Johnny Cash in particular. While Music City proper has its own Johnny Cash Museum, the Man in Black’s beloved farm in Bon Aqua, Tennessee—about 40 miles west of the city—has now been transformed into the Storytellers Museum and Cash Hideaway Farm, which opened to the public last week.

The manner by which Cash came into possession of the 107-acre farm in the early 1970s has the makings of a great country song: in his 1997 memoirs, Cash: The Autobiography, the iconic musician wrote about how he discovered that his accountant at the time was embezzling money from him, and using it to make real estate deals. After learning of the financial improprieties, Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, sold off all but one of the properties—the Bon Aqua farm, writing that his first impression of the place was “love at first sight.”

Though it fell into disrepair following Cash’s death in 2003, husband-and-wife Brian and Sally Oxley purchased the property in 2015 and immediately began the process of restoring it. When a nearby general store that Cash had used to host his 'Saturday Night in Hickman County' concerts also went up for sale, they purchased that, too. That building now serves as the Storytellers Museum, which houses some of Cash’s most prized and personal possessions, including several of his guitars and the black Mercedes-Benz he drove for the last 14 years of his life and which he wrote about in the song “One Piece at a Time.”

The museum will also resurrect Cash’s concert series by hosting live music events daily. Just a mile up the road is Cash Hideaway Farm, where Cash and his family lived for more than 30 years, calling it the place where he could “live the life of a country boy. I love to and I need to.”

Source: Conde Nast Traveler

Visit StoryTeller's Museum HERE