Johnny Cash used a Tennessee farm as his private hideaway for about 30 years; restored from 2015 and opened in 2016, the Bon Aqua property now welcomes visitors into his farmhouse

Every touring musician needs a spot where they can go and make it their own; a place where no publicist is allowed, no set list is performed, and no strangers are asking for a photo. The property where Johnny Cash went for an escape was his 107-acre farm outside a Tennessee town. He termed it what you could only imagine: his “hideaway” place. Bon Aqua, Tennessee, was the home address that the Man in Black had for nearly 30 years, and it's a place that many twenty- and thirty-somethings are stopping on their way out of Nashville today.

A 2009 peer-reviewed study titled “Before they were famous: music‐based tourism and a musician's hometown roots,” published in the Journal of Place Management and Development, revealed that the houses and hometowns of such music icons as Elvis Presley and his home in Tupelo and Bob Dylan and his home in Hibbing appeal to visitors via pilgrimage, nostalgia and heritage. And that the audience has expanded well beyond the original baby boomer demographic. Johnny Cash's farm is tailor-made for this topic. He did not design it as a museum for admirers. It was a real working farmhouse where a great man, much exhausted, deliberately sought respite from the sort of attention he now draws posthumously to his front door from the crowd of his huge fanbase.

A farm he never meant to share


The farmhouse itself dates to 1837, making it roughly 95 years older than Cash, who was born in 1932. Its origins go back to an 1806 land grant to Revolutionary War veteran Andrew Jefferson Ponder, and then to the purchase of the land and the mineral springs by farmer William Loch Weems in the 1830s, who built the farmhouse and named the surrounding area "Bon Aqua" (meaning "good water") and marketed it in the 19th century as a health resort. It was part of the Weems family till the early 1970s, when Cash found his accountant had embezzled his cash to purchase real estate, and then came to the farm almost by chance. He was smitten by it right away. He called it, as the farm’s own historical records state, "the center of my universe", and lived there for the next 30 years with June Carter Cash, before they both died in 2003.

Why this is more than a road trip today

Nostalgia tourism was a euphemism for the retirees returning to the relics of their youth. That's changing fast. In a 2024 article titled “Trends and Perspectives of Nostalgia in Tourism: A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis,” published in the journal Sustainability, Angie Lorena Salgado Moreno and Jorge Alexander Mora Forero observed that the nostalgia tourism phenomenon is one of the fastest growing arenas in tourism studies and that travelers have come to visit locations that have been connected to eras and personalities that they have never personally experienced in their own lives, in which they seek to find an identity and a sense of belonging, not merely recall a memory. That's the same principle that a farm like Cash's plays by if you are born a few decades after "Ring of Fire" was first released on the radio.

It also keeps up with the way the youngsters spend their travel dollars. According to a 2024 Time Out survey report titled “Here’s what Millennials and Gen Zers are up to this summer,” passive sightseeing is not the only way to travel, as over 50% of millennial and Gen Z respondents have hit the road for concerts, festivals and entertainment activities. A secret country house, belonging to a country legend, is an ideal fit for that.

What's actually on the property

The new owners started the process of restoration in 2015 and the farm was opened to the public in 2016. The tours pass through the farmhouse itself, where exhibits focus on the less public aspect of Cash's life, and on to the "Car Shed," where the true One Piece at a Time car (built to match his 1976 number-one hit of the same name) and Johnny Paycheck's Cadillac are on display. An old general store has been restored down the road to be the Storytellers Museum, where Cash and his children used to hold free, unadvertised concerts on the small stage to locals, called "Saturday Night in Hickman County.” Today it is also used for weddings, corporate events, and film shoots and is available to be booked on Airbnb.

The part that feels a bit out of the ordinary

The honest tension in the brochure is that a man purchased this land to escape performing before people, and now the land is rented for wedding receptions. And probably it is the only realistic way a private farm like this would not gradually come to an end. However, it's fair to point out the irony before you book a slot, and it is worth visiting the official site to find out the days and hours during which the tours are offered, as this varies according to season and has changed more than once since the farm reopened. The Hideaway Farm is indeed a special place. Not only did a legend perform there, but a legend lived there, and you can still come and walk through without a velvet rope in sight.