Before June, There Was Vivian: Remembering Johnny Cash’s Controversial First Wife

Before there was the iconic musical duo Johnny and June, there was Staff Sergeant Johnny R. Cash and Vivian Liberto, Johnny Cash’s controversial first wife. Cash and Liberto wed on August 7, 1954, after spending most of their courtship in different countries.

Johnny Cash and June Carter’s star power and decades-long marriage often overshadow Liberto’s story, but it’s certainly one to remember.

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Johnny Cash’s Controversial First Wife, Vivian

A then-19-year-old Johnny Cash met a then-17-year-old Vivian Liberto at a San Antonio roller rink in the summer of 1951. The pair hit it off instantly, making Cash’s sudden military departure to Germany all the more difficult. Cash and Liberto exchanged thousands of letters while the young soldier was away, expressing their love for one another. Upon Cash’s return, they quickly started a family, having their first child, Rosanne, nine months after their early August wedding.

Around the same time, Cash’s career was rapidly growing, and infidelity and drug use were entering the fold of their union. In 1965, police arrested Cash for drug possession in El Paso. Liberto attended the court hearing, but instead of papers running news articles about Cash’s scandalous arrest, headlines focused on Liberto’s appearance. With her full lips, olive skin, and dark eyes, some onlookers assumed Liberto was Black—a massive taboo in the mid-1960s South.

After newspapers ran photos of Cash and Liberto walking hand in hand out of the courtroom, Southern venues began canceling Cash’s shows in protest of what they believed to be an interracial marriage. “Money from the sale of [Cash’s] records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women,” a white supremacist newspaper wrote (via Washington Post). Cash and his management team quickly came to Liberto’s defense, something she would later consider a mistake that validated their racist remarks.

The Country Star’s Long-Lasting Effects on Vivian Liberto

Several years and three children later, the marriage began to crumble. Terrified of racial attacks and buckling under the stress of Cash’s ongoing affair with his future second wife, June Carter, Vivian Liberto’s health started to suffer. In the documentary My Darling Vivian, Rosanne Cash said she often wondered if her mother would commit suicide. “I’m not saying this out of self-pity. I’m saying it looking back from decades on and going, ‘That was f***ed up’” (via Rolling Stone).

Liberto attempted to give Cash an ultimatum, threatening to file for divorce, but the attempt backfired, and Cash allowed Liberto to go through with the filing. The divorce had a lasting impact on Liberto, who came from a devout Catholic background. The church forbade Liberto from taking communion until Cash sent a letter detailing how the divorce was his fault alone. Two years later, Cash and Carter married, and Liberto married a police officer named Dick Distin.

Despite their tumultuous history, Liberto never lost her love for her first husband. After Johnny Cash died in 2003, Liberto told her daughters: “Even though I didn’t see him or talk to him very often, just knowing he was on the planet was enough. But now that he’s not, I don’t know if I want to be here” (via Washington Post). She died two years later in 2005, but her early 1960s love with Johnny Cash was forever immortalized in the country star’s iconic track, “Walk the Line.”

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