The sister of Johnny Cash and a native of Dyess, Ark., Joanne Cash Yates founded the Nashville Cowboy Church 32 years ago with her husband, the late Dr. Harry Yates, as a gathering of six people in a Holiday Inn lounge. On Sun., Aug. 7, she retired from a thriving, music-filled ministry that provided a welcoming place of worship for tourists, bikers, musicians and anyone else from its home in Music Valley.
"Since Harry's heavenly homecoming last September, I have proceeded forward with the outreach, but now the season has come for me to retire and for the Nashville Cowboy Church outreach to enter into a new season as well," she wrote in an Aug. 2 Facebook post.
Two members of the church band, Sandi Kay and Jay Shupe, will continue the tradition of Sunday morning church services at the Texas Troubadour Theatre (across from the Grand Ole Opry House on McGavock Pike) as the Music Valley Cowboy Church.
The retirement announcement adds that the Nashville Cowboy Church Facebook will repost past services from the Yates family's ministry each week.
Like several other members of the Cash family, Yates has recorded multiple country and gospel music projects. The singer-songwriter has collaborated in studio with relatives (including brothers Johnny and Tommy Cash, niece Rosanne Cash and nephew John Carter Cash) and such like-minded talents as Tami Neilson, the Oak Ridge Boys and King & Country. Her music can be heard on Spotify via the albums Gospel (2007) and Breaking Down the Barriers (2015) and the duets compilation Unbroken (2018).
A 2018 music video for "Back Home in Arkansas" was filmed in Dyess, where Yates and her brother Tommy helped Arkansas State University preserve their childhood home.
She chronicled her life story and Christian testimony in her autobiography All My Fears are Gone, which has a forward written by Johnny Cash and an afterword by Larry Gatlin.
