Dyess is a town in Mississippi County, Arkansas, Unite States. The population was 515 at the 2000 census. Dyess was founded in 1934. Johnny Cash's biography "Man in Black" describes Dyess as a planned community built as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal program, with streets laid out in a wheel pattern. According to Dyess History, the town, which is actually a colony, was a project called an Agricultural Cooperative Project. It was named after W.R. Dyess, who was the first Works Progress Administrator in the state of Arkansas. The town's administration had the main purpose of giving poor families a chance to start over with land they could work toward owning.