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Vivian Liberto Distin (April 23, 1934 – May 24, 2005) was an American homemaker and author. She was the first wife of singer Johnny Cash and the inspiration for his first hit single I Walk The Line.

Biography

Born and raised around San Antonio, Texas, Liberto was the daughter of Irene (Robinson) a homemaker and Thomas Peter Liberto and insurance salesman and amateur magician. Her paternal grandparents were from Cefalù, Palermo, Sicily. Her mother was German and Irish.

On July 18, 1951, while in Air Force basic training, Cash met 17-year-old Vivian at a roller skating rink in San Antonio, Texas. The couple courted for three weeks before the Air Force deployed Cash to West Germany for a three-year tour. During the separation, the couple exchanged thousands of letters that would eventually form the basis for Liberto’s memoir I Walked the Line, which was published in 2007. On August 7, 1954, one month after his discharge, they were married at St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church in San Antonio. The Wedding Mass was offered by Vivian's uncle, a Catholic priest named Father Vincent Liberto. They had four daughters: Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara.

They immediately settled in Memphis, Tennessee where Johnny Cash took a job as a vacuum cleaner salesman. Within the first year of their marriage Cash had become a rising country music star. After his rapid success Cash moved Vivian and their family to Hollywood where he pursued film roles and music industry connections when he wasn’t on tour. In 1961, Cash moved the family to a hilltop home overlooking Casitas Springs, California. He had previously moved his parents to the area to run a small trailer park called the Johnny Cash Trailer Park. As Cash frequently away from home on tour and the area had no amenities Vivian and her daughters were very isolated. Vivian often had to dispatch rattlesnakes and other vermin around the property.

Personal Life

Johnny and Vivian Cash four daughters: Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara. After Johnny Cash had numerous affairs including a high profile relationship with future wife June Carter Cash, Vivian filed for divorce in 1966 after twelve years of marriage. In 1968 Liberto married Dick Distin, a police officer in Ventura, California, to whom she remained married until her death in 2005.

Religion

Vivian Liberto Cash was raised in a very strict and devout Roman Catholic Sicilian American household. She attended the all girls Catholic school St. Mary’s in San Antonio. She remained devoutly Catholic her entire life and was perennially active in her local church. Because of her status as a divorcee she was excommunicated from the Catholic Church immediately following the dissolution of her first marriage to Johnny Cash. Cash arranged to meet with representatives of the church and signed a paper taking full responsibility for the divorce and Vivian’s ability to take communion was reinstated.

Memoir

In 2002 Vivian was approached by freelancer writer/producer Ann Sharpsteen about appearing in a retrospective program about Johnny Cash for VHI. Though Vivian declined the offer she decided to publish her memoirs and hired Ann as her editor and biographer..

Thunderbolt Newsletter Incident

In 1965 Vivian’s husband Johnny Cash was arrested in Texas for possession of hundreds of amphetamine pills and bringing drugs into the UNited States across the Mexican border. Though both spouses had been estranged for the past three years, Vivian flew out to El Paso, Texas to accompany Cash to his court hearing. A widely circulated black and white photograph of them leaving the courthouse together was purposefully darkened and distorted by The Thunderbolt, a racist newsletter published by KKK leader J.B. Stoner and distributed by the White supremacist National States' Rights Party. In response to the article in The Thunderbolt Johnny Cash hired Nashville lawyer Johnny Jay Hooker and threatened a 25 million dollar lawsuit against the KKK. However the incident soon faded and there was no impact on Cash’s career at the time.

Nearly two years later however, due to Johnny Cash’s vocal criticisms of the United States treatment of Native Americans and his association with hippie counterculture figures such asBob Dylan, The KKK reignited their racist hate campaign targeting Vivian. Both Vivian and Johnny Cash received both hate mail and death threats. Flyers were distributed at Johnny Cash‘s concerts by Citizens United urging people to call a phone number where a reading of the Thunderbolt article played and declared, “the race mixers of this country continue to sell records to your teenage children.” Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash‘s manager met with Robert Shelton Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and threatened a $200,000 lawsuit for harassment. Saul also contacted national and local newspapers to correct the story. Vivian Cash’s genealogy was traced and letters from associates validating her race as Caucasian were requested and submitted to booking agents so Johnny Cash could continue to play concert dates in the south.

Ancestry Controversy

Following the threats to her life by white supremacists who believed she was black, Vivian Cash’s ancestry became a source of speculation and gossip thereafter. Throughout the years the rumor that “Johnny Cash’s first was Black” was occasionally mentioned in newspapers and periodicals. Her daughter Rosanne Cash said that, “my mother faded into this kind of negative obscurity.“ Later with the advent of the internet Vivian’s ancestry became a source of discussion on both news websites and blogs, the majority of which challenged or mocked Vivian’s clearly stated Sicilian European narrative as “false” and that she was “passing” for white. One of the longest running challenges to Vivian Liberto’s ancestral narrative has come from Left wing New Zealand political commentator Nándor Tánczos who claims that Vivian Liberto Cash was “a Black woman.”

In 2021, genealogist Henry Louis Gates from the show Finding Your Roots featured Rosanne Cash as his guest and confirmed Vivian Liberto’s predominately European ancestry including paternal ancestry traced back 300 years in Cefalu, Sicily. Gates also discovered that one of Vivian’s 32 maternal great-great-grandmothers, Sarah A. Shields, was a mixed-race woman born into slavery, who was freed along with her eight siblings by their white father. Gates also found wedding registry records for Sarah and her white husband William Robinson. Who had married legally and openly during the Civil War in Durham Alabama with Sarah’s father paying the county recorder to legalize the wedding. Gates assumed (though couldn’t confirm) that Sarah Shields’ mother recorded on the slave schedule as “Jinsy” had most likely been an enslaved fully African woman possibly making one of Vivian Cash’s 64 great great great grandparents fully Black African with the rest being of full European ancestry.

According to her official biographer Ann Sharpsteen and Vivian Cash’s own words in her 2007 memoir, Vivian strongly identified throughout her life as a White/Sicilian-American and didn’t identify as Black or multi racial, stating in her memoir, “It didn’t help that Johnny issued a statement to the KKK informing them that I wasn’t black. To this day I hate when accusations and threats from people like that are dignified with any response at all.“ .

Legacy

Black Cadillac Rosanne Cash’s eleventh studio album is dedicated to Vivian Liberto, her father, and stepmother, June Carter Cash. The tracks “Burn Down This Town“ and “I Was Watching You” directly reference Vivian. Black Cadillac was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk album in 2007. Liberto was portrayed in the Cash biopic Walk the Line by actress Ginnifer Goodwin and by Anna Grace Stewart in the CMT miniseries Sun Records. Liberto's life and times are chronicled in the 2020 documentary film, My Darling Vivian, which premiered as part of the South by Southwest 2020 Film Festival Collection, presented by Amazon Prime Video.

References

1. ^ Stated on My Darling Vivian Documentary, February 23, 2020
2. "Why Hate Groups Went After Johnny Cash in the 1960s". History. Retrieved November 7, 2018.
3. Maslin, Janet (August 30, 2007). "When Man in Black Was Just Johnny". The New York Times. p. D 7.
4. Johnson, Brett (August 30, 2007). "The Man in Black's first wife, Vivian Cash, tells of romance, heartbreak". VC Star. Camarillo, California. p. D 7.
5. Vivian Cash with Ann Sharpsteen, I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny – September 4, 2007, First Edition, 2007Foreword
6. Vivian Cash with Ann Sharpsteen, I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny – September 4, 2007, First Edition, 2001p.315
7. Julie Chadwick, The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Iconp.376
8. Julie Chadwick, The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Iconp.436
9. Tanczos, Nandor (July 17, 2017). "Black Is An Invisible Colour". Monkey Wrenching. p. D 7.
10. ^ Stated on Finding Your Roots, February 23, 2021
11. Vivian Cash with Ann Sharpsteen, I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny – September 4, 2007, First Edition, 2001p.315
12. Betts, Stephen (April 29, 2020). "Johnny Cash's First Wife Profiled in New Doc 'My Darling Vivian': What We Learned". Rolling Stone. New York City.

• 1934 births
• 2005 deaths
• Johnny Cash
• Cash–Carter family