A bronze statue of the country musician Johnny Cash was set to be unveiled on Tuesday at the US Capitol as one of two representations there for the state of Arkansas.
The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the chamber’s minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, were to join the state’s congressional delegation, the governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and members of the late, Grammy-winning singer’s family for the unveiling.
Cash was born in the small town of Kingsland outside of Little Rock. He would go on to become one of the bestselling artists of all time, with 90m records sold. He was inducted into both the Country Music and Rock and Roll halls of fame in his lifetime. He died in 2003 at the age of 71.
Arkansas lawmakers agreed in 2019 to replace statues of two little-known figures that were representing the state in the US Capitol’s national statuary hall collection. Each state is allowed two notable figures in the collection.
Cash will join a statue of the civil rights leader Daisy Bates, who played a pivotal role in supporting the Little Rock Nine as they integrated a school that had been racially segregated. Her statue was unveiled in May.
The two new statues replaced ones that honored Uriah Rose and James Paul Clarke. Rose helped create the American Bar Association and was a Confederate sympathizer. Clarke was a lawmaker in the state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The two statues of Rose and Clarke had been in the Capitol for more than 100 years.
State lawmakers were trying to be “reflective of Arkansas in a more contemporary fashion that reflects some more modern historic figures in the state”, Rick Crawford, a Republican congressman from the state, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette earlier this year.
The artist Kevin Kresse created the Cash statue, which shows the musician with a guitar slung across his back and a hand in the instrument’s strap across his chest.
When she saw a clay model of the statue in 2022, Cash’s daughter Rosanne Cash, who is also a singer-songwriter, said: “It’s uncanny how he brought soul into this statue. It’s startling and beautiful.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
• This article was amended on 25 September 2024. Daisy Bates was a civil rights activist who helped support the Little Rock Nine, but was not a member of that student group, as was originally written.
