House of Cash — Hendersonville

The House of Cash on Johnny Cash Parkway (formerly East Rockland Road) in Hendersonville, Tennessee, was a museum and office complex that Cash built in 1974 to house his archives, memorabilia, and business operations. For decades it served as a combination of public museum and working headquarters — visitors could tour a collection of Cash's stage costumes, instruments, gold and platinum records, and personal artefacts while the surrounding offices handled the administrative side of one of America's most productive musical careers. It was, in Cash's characteristic fashion, both a commercial enterprise and a genuine act of openness: he wanted people to see the material record of what he had made.

The museum sat a short distance from the Cash family home on Old Hickory Lake, where Cash and June Carter Cash had lived since the late 1960s. The lake house — a substantial property that became a centre of Nashville musical life, where artists visited, where Cash recorded in his private studio, and where he spent the last years of his life — was destroyed by fire in 2007, four years after Cash's death. The House of Cash museum closed in 1999 and the building was sold; it has since been used for other purposes and the museum collection dispersed.

Hendersonville in Sumner County, north of Nashville on Old Hickory Lake, is closely associated with Cash. He chose the community deliberately, drawn by the lake and the relative quiet, and remained there for the rest of his life. The House of Cash building still stands on the parkway that was renamed in his honour. For fans making a Hendersonville pilgrimage, the building, the lake, and the nearby Hendersonville Memory Gardens where Cash and June are buried constitute the essential itinerary.