Thursday, April 08, 2010

Johnny Cash - descendant of Scottish Covenanters?

(NB: If you're reading this on Facebook, you can read this post in full on my blog). There's a 30 minute radio programme on BBC iPlayer which I listened to today called "Johnny Cash Of Easter Cash". (click here to listen)

Easter-Cash-Fife.jpg

It traces Cash's roots to Easter Cash, near Falkland in Fife, to an ancestor called William Cash (1653 - 1708) who emigrated to Virginia in the 1670s and settled in Westmoreland County, where many Ulster emigrants later settled. Falkland was the birthplace of the famous Covenanter minister Richard Cameron (1648 - 1680). Maybe they were even boyhood friends; lots of Covenanters ended up being sent as slaves to Virginia during the 1670s and 1680s. Johnny Cash visited Falkland a few times, and some of the people he met are interviewed in the programme. Well worth a listen.

RELATED ARTICLES:
> Article "From Nashville to Govan" (with a Covenanter reference)
> Article "Johnny Cash's Scottish Roots Explored in New Documentary"
> Article "Scottish Roots of Johnny Cash - the man in black tartan"

(Pic above of Easter Cash from this article)

2 comments:

Professor Billy McWilliams said...

Might be wrong here, but in his auto-bio Cash describes himself as Scotch Irish. Worth a look.

Mine said...

Johnny Cash is definitely of Scot-Irish descent. I am Scot-Irish. My family were Covenanters. My family lived not far from the Cash family in Arkansas. The people in that area, from the Ozarks through the Smokey Mts. of Tenn and into Appalachia and the Blue Ridge are predominately of Scot-Irish descent. The Scot-Irish in these area are also usually of Native American Indian descent because we intermarried with the locals. Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn are good examples of that.