BLACK IS AN INVISIBLE COLOURY’all know I’m a country girl. I grew up on a farm. I’m a Native Texan. I like cowboys, big hats, big trucks and country music. :) Country music is in my blood. My Twitter pal @GrooveSDC says his family are ‘black red necks’, I tweeted to him, I guess I’m a black red neck too. :) I loved listening to Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson.
Until yesterday, I never knew, Vivian Cash, first wife of Johnny Cash existed. What a gorgeous woman. And those 4 beautiful daughters belong to Johnny and Vivian. You learn something new everyday. Talk about shocked!
……….
I used to say I like every kind of music except Country. That was until my good friend Steve Abel made me sit down and listen to ‘Johnny Cash at San Quentin’, recorded live at the infamous prison. I was an instant fan.
So when “Walk the Line”, the Johnny Cash biopic, was released in 2005 I was eager to see it. I thought it was a great movie, with some brilliant scenes, like the one where Ma and Pa Carter see off Cash’s dealer with shotguns as he quits cold turkey. They seemed to epitomise the best of White Southern Christian Decency, in contrast to the usual treatment we see of Southern hypocrisy, malice and racist cruelty.
The romance between Johnny Cash and June Carter was of course the main thread of the movie. It winds around his protracted wooing of her and ends with a caption celebrating their 35 year partnership on and off stage after she finally agrees to marry him. His first wife Vivian is portrayed as a woman just never suited to be his wife and who drove him away with her bitterness, jealousy and resentment. I remember idly wondering what she was really like, and whether this was a fair portrayal of her character, as the story moved back to his great love for June.
The Cash sisters. Rosanne is in the red and Kathy is in the dark blue.
Vivian Cash & daughter Roseann Cash
Watching the movie for a second time the other day I was again swept up in what a nasty, bitter woman Vivian was, even as another part of my mind again questioned the representation. In the garden with my wife the following day, we began deconstructing the movie as we worked. As we talked through different elements of the plot, I began to feel more and more uneasy. Later I decided to google Vivian Cash. I found a review of her book ‘I Walked the Line’, written after the film came out. Not surprisingly it gave a very different story to the film, suggesting that their marriage had been very happy until June stole John away. What WAS surprising, though, was when I looked at photos of Vivian. Turns out that she was a black woman.
You’d never know from reading any of the articles about her.
You’d certainly never know from watching the movie, where she is played by Ginnifer Goodwin.
In fact the only thing I found in my admittedly brief search that referenced her ethnicity was a newspaper headline from when he was busted for drugs that says “ARREST EXPOSES JOHNNY CASH’S NEGRO WIFE”. Presumably exposes her for the sin of being black in the USA.
Interestingly, in contrast to the newspaper article from the time, the film shows him leaving court alone and coming home to her censorious displeasure. It is shortly after this arrest that the chronology of the film shows them separating.
I’d noticed before that there are almost no black people in the film. Two shoe shiners are the sum total are far as I remember. I imagine the director, James Mangold, justifies this by saying that there are no black characters who are important to the story. That is if you don’t include his first wife.
Suddenly the treatment of Vivian makes complete sense. In the world of American Country music, of course the black woman is the villain of the story – even when her husband leaves her and her four daughters for another woman. June and John are considered one of the most iconic couples in country music history, and no black woman is going to undermine that narrative. Her character has to be destroyed. But even that is not enough. Her very identity is robbed from her, made invisible by whitewash.
They say that black is not a colour, it is the absence of light. That certainly seems to be true in Hollywood.
They should have had Halle Berry or Tamron Hall play Vivian in the WALK THE LINE movie….
Vivian was not black. She was Italian (Siciliano). You should have gotten your facts right. She was not as she was portrayed in that movie.
What does it matter whether she was black, white, pink, Italian, French etc… she was a woman, a human being… she was a person…
This was all started by the KKK a couple of days after a picture was taken of Johnny and Vivian leaving the hearing after his arrest on drugs. If you google it shows that the KKK started it. They hated Johnny.
White people have lost their mind over this thread….
Vivian wasn’t black…She was Italian but I could see why people would think she was multiracial….
Curly thick hair, dark skin (many Italians get a great tan) and they lived in the sunny south…
The black and white photography added to the controversy…
My great grandmother Amelia Barone from Naples (arrived at Ellis Island in 1902) was just as ethnic and dark as Vivian…(in dark B&W photos she did not look White)…
My granddad was the darkest one out of 10 surviving children with very curly dark hair and dark skin however he had VERY nordic facial features…Many in my family have had ancestry DNA tests and we all have ZERO african ancestry….
Southern Italians are not a pure ethnicity, there were many migrations into Southern Italy by Spanish and Greeks as well as the slaves the Romans brought in from all the countries they conquered…Funny I always thought Roseann looked Italian…. I have even seen old medium complexion black guys who reminded me very much of my Neopolitan Granddad….
Must be hard for you? 😂😂😂😂😂
I doubt if those DNA tests is accurate if they said “NO African ancestry)….
She’s actually Italian, but I assume you’ve discovered that by now. Was never a country fan either — until I started listening to Cash. Anyway, cheers and Happy Holidays.
Mike from California
OK THEN!
Her surname Liberto it sounds Italian for sure
Sure Jan! Have you looked at her?
This is news to me. When I found these pictures I showed them to my husband and he as well was shocked. She were a hidden secret in his life.
Brilliant!
Vivian Liberto Cash was a beautiful woman regardless of her heritage. White, black, mixed, whatever.
I would bet you that her mother was black, look at her brother’s nose. My father was passable, he had four brothers and a sister and they all looked white and if you did not know that family was black you would be totally fooled. This was in Mississippi and they were listed as Mulatto on the U.S. Census better yet go to Louisiana and you will see something. I grew up with many passable kids and they were much lighter than her. With this woman her lips is a give away .Her mother’s name is typically black from that area and how many white people use the last name Robinson. Her mothers birth and death certificate will clear it up. If that is her brother above then game over.
Thank you for this insightful article, I was also curious about the true nature of the bitter first wife. This answered so many of my questions.
Thank you for doing the research and bringing this out. I can not believe that all these years I had no idea. I remember being interested in Johnny Cash’s life and reading about him and June and also him and Vivian. I remember thinking what tipical Rock Star asshole.
How did I not notice or realize that his beautiful wife was a beautiful black woman. How did I miss this. I am usually a very detailed person.
I can not even imagine what his wife was thinking or feeling while he was running around with June. It makes me sad. I really pray to god that that news arrival is not the reason he started separating himself from her. I mean he married her and had 4 children with her. It’s hard to say. Look at Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner etc. it seems they all do it. Get a little success then forget the person they loved and who was there for them when they had nothing. It makes me sick. The way black people were treated makes me sick and a lot of times I feel like I was born the wrong color because I am not an ingnorant racist pig like a lot of my ancestors .
This article is BULLSHIT. Whoever wrote this obviously didnt read her book (like i did) that she wrote before she died. Unless her daughters take a dna test we will never know FOR SURE whether she had any african american ancestry. She was Sicilan Italian! So am i & since i was little people always assumed i was spanish. And btw Vivian and johnys relationship was over WAY before she was seen with him at court. So to claim thats why he left her because of the title on that newspaper clipping is reaching for shit that was not there. Vivian was just mad that Johny gave them a response over it. However June was not this good girl like they portrayed she was in the movie. According to vivians book~Johnys mother~and band members~~~It was June who kept trying to pursue Johny and not the other way around. She was also a drug addict who did not get Johny off drugs. Vivian said that June straight told her to her face that she will get Johny. And Vivian wasnt cold or unsupportive ~she was the complete opposite in real life. Not at all surprising since most “true” movies like to make the cheater the victim so we can justify their actions.
LOL you write this as you knew Vivian personally.
Isn’t it crazy how they did a dna test and found African blood 😱
Vivian Cash looking 200% better then June Carter , Johnny’s end wife. There is no comparison at all but you know white America and the hillbilly red neck lowlife southern states personify stupidity of racist bigots !! Vivian should have been an even bigger part of the story in the movie but even today those pesky scared white boy producers and directors still have their grandpappy’s DNA and ways in every fiber of their cold heart and weak brain….making America great again !??
Absolutely
Thank you for this. It’s too bad Hollywood, or the director couldn’t keep this real. I was shocked to find his wife was of color, because she sure does not look white. It’s unfortunate they did this to Vivian in the movie.
She is not black she is Italian, an Dutch she just looked black because of the black an white photos
bwa ha ha ha ha ha
OK THEN!
Lol….yeah they’re funny , hahaha !
Dude…wake up and open your stupid eyes , this beautiful lady is of color and the color isn’t pink , red or white ! No Italian looks like her without black mans blood none of them. However there are millions of white people who’s grandparent are of mixed race and were never ever told so when you see today’s white person with dark eyes and dark thick hair , a white person tries to deflect the obvious by saying -“I’m naturally tan , I take after my Greek uncle , I’m Italian , I’m Sicilian , I’m just white with olive skin” …but we know better. Half breed women most likely got away with it back in the 1930, 40, 50’s by acting as if they were Greek and married a white man to make life easy – and some goofy white guys was just glad to have a wife and now a beautiful one at that. So in closing ….this chick ain’t white dude , wake the heck up and stop trying to make her what’s she’s not !!!!
RACISTS ASSHOLE.”Black Man’s Blood” OH women of color NEVER went with white men did they.You are stupid & bigoted
Now I’ll give some Italian but Dutch? Please. They’re whiter than Tide.
Jessica Alba has Danish, Welsh, German, English, and French ancestry on her mother’s side and Mexican on her father’s. You never know what Gene’s will be more dominant.
Naw, because of the ANCIENT Black blood that Mediterraneans have. and maybe thru the Dutch, too, because Spaniards (ALSO Black-derived) made the scene in Holland. Woman looked like Eartha Kitt meets Halle Berry.
The author treats the idea that Vivian was a mulatto, though her family denied it.
Black.
Just finished listening to audiobook the story of Johnny Cash the life by Robert Hilburn, Johnny did love Vivian, it’s an amazing but true story of the facts, its 21 hours listening time. You should read or listen to it, you would find it very interesting.
Enjoy listening to the true story of Johnny Cash its black and white truths, it hides no darkness of his life. Also it will settle any argument over the race of Vivian she was an amazing woman who suffered a lot.
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/982865121201541120
Johnny & Vivian Cash with three of their daughters
Beautiful photo of the Cash family
https://twitter.com/AnthonyMasonCBS/status/982241350568390658
Beautiful family
1957: Country singer/songwriter Johnny Cash holds a guitar as his wife Vivian Liberto and daughters, Rosanne Cash and Kathy Cash look on in 1957. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Cindy, Johnny, Kathy and Rosanne Cash sitting around at the children’s grandparent’s home in San Antonio.
Photos courtesy of Scribner. Vivian [Liberto] and Johnny Cash married in San Antonio, Texas, her hometown, on Aug. 7, 1954, a little more than a month after his return from Air Force duty in Europe.”
This article was an amazing read..shead alot of light….on Hollywood… I guess if not for their Children.. Vivien.. Would still not exist…
Thank you for sheading light…
She was a BEAUTIFUL BLACK WOMAN
https://twitter.com/JohnnyCash/status/953327190250319872
Vivian was Italian, not black. Google it.
LOL! Like I need google to tell me when someone is black or not? You’re funny.
When Hannibal invaded Italy with his elephants over the mountain, what you believe to be dark Italians become that way due to his men taking Italians wives and those the string of Black Italians of African descent and as you know, your pure race people consider them non-white. He was decent enough to marry her. Most of the others just raped captured African slaves. I guess the same was done when Africans conquered European people. Truth OK?
Not only THAT, Ron; that quintessential Italian, Julius Caesar (who enjoyed “coal-burning” HIMSELF), had African troops in his Legions who settled in Italy, starting families after they left his service. There has been an “asphalt treatment ” in the gene pool there for millennia.
bwa ha ha ha ha There is no such thing as a race card. Racism is very real and you’ve shown yours to everyone. You just outted yourself. Sad pitiful bigot. Why are you angry about someone else’ marriage? It’s none of your damn business. Let yourself out Missy and don’t let the door knob hit you in the ass on your way out.
Vivian Liberto Cash was italian, dutch and english her father said. Her father had to send proof of ancestry to a newspaper sonewhere down south. Shes not black.
OK THEN!
LOL
Alright now! Don’t fuck with Johnny Cash’s kids. They’re not having it.
https://twitter.com/m_tisserand/status/898048443532419072
The only justification I can imagine to the actual filmmaker is this: already they are trying to make a beautiful love story out of a man who left his wife and 4 children to be with another woman. So they had to pretend June was trying to resist, rather than being the aggressor, and that the first wife wasn’t very sympathetic. Now imagine this same movie where Johnny Cash leaves a black woman for June Carter. I am guessing there would be MOSTLY a national uproar and not people writing songs about wanting to be Johnny and June. Not saying it’s right, and I am very bummed out because I DID sympathize for the wife character even before I knew the full story, but. An accurate movie would have been TERRIBLE. Just the same, I wonder why they felt it was ok to go ahead with the movie using these completely fabricated pieces. I think I might have scrapped the project if I knew the whole story.
Johnny Cash with first wife: Vivian Cash & family
https://twitter.com/3ChicsPolitico/status/889000337390145537
https://twitter.com/3ChicsPolitico/status/888999111692832768
😍😍😍😍
Johnny Cash addressed his love letters to Vivian Cash as …
“My Darling Vivian” or “My Baby”
Johnny Cash’s first wife tells of romance, heartbreak
The tours also drew women, and when Vivian asked Johnny if he was ever tempted, he told her not to worry — “I walk the line for you.”
http://www.vcstar.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/26/johnny-cashs-first-wife-tells-of-romance-heartbreak-june-carter-vivian-cash-/92772320/
GOOD READ. SAD THO.
Drugs and June Carter, Vivian Cash writes in her new book, ruined her marriage to music icon Johnny Cash — and Carter, others told her, was the more relentless of the two threats.
Vivian was the one cast out of the spotlight, left behind to raise her and Johnny’s four daughters in Ventura as he and June Carter became the king and queen of country music in almost storybook romance style. Vivian became fodder only for, as she writes, people curious about her past with her famous ex-husband and those of the Nashville mind-set who wanted her “written out of Johnny’s history altogether.”
Now Vivian’s writing back, so to speak, in “I Walked The Line: My Life with Johnny,” released this fall. By turns sad and uplifting, the book is a sobering antidote to our celebrity-obsessed culture and speaks to the oft-ignored fallout from fame.
In it, Vivian confesses that she never stopped loving Johnny and wistfully ruminates on what might have been had drugs and June not entered their lives. The heart and setting for much of this is Johnny and Vivian’s stint living in a hillside home above Nye Road in Casitas Springs from 1961 to 1967, a period containing some of the most colorful and worst of the legendary Man in Black’s bad-boy behavior — the pills, the booze, the binges, the arrests and an infamous June 1965 forest fire he set above Fillmore.
It wasn’t long after they moved to Casitas Springs, Vivian writes in the book, “that everything, and I mean everything, started to fall apart.” While Johnny toured (sometimes with June) and his fame grew, Vivian stayed home.
“She’d say, If I only could have traveled with him instead of being here raising four kids, things would have been different,'” recalled longtime friend Alice Smith of Ventura. “She said that a lot.”
Vivian remarried (Ventura Police Officer Dick Distin, who still lives in town) in 1968 and lived out her days in Ventura, an active, admired and social member of the community. All four daughters she had with Cash — Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara — graduated from St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura.
Vivian died in May 2005 at age 71, shortly after finishing the manuscript on her days with Johnny.
In some ways, her book is a retort to the Oscar-winning 2005 film “Walk the Line,” with Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny and Reese Witherspoon as June depicted in a dreamy love story.
The film portrayed Johnny as the aggressive pursuer and June as the reluctant one, but Vivian paints June as the chaser — most pointedly in the book when she writes about an angry backstage confrontation (in an unnamed place) in which June said to her, “Vivian, he will be mine.”
“She wanted people to know June went after Johnny,” said Ann Sharpsteen, who co-authored the book with Vivian. “That was where most of her pain and anger rested all these years.”
Vivian’s daughter, Cindy Cash, largely agrees with her mother.
“Once June came along, she relentlessly — well, she wanted Dad and she was going to get him,” said Cindy, who lives in Ventura. “And she did. She made herself very available, to where he pursued her back.”
MORE….
http://www.vcstar.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/26/johnny-cashs-first-wife-tells-of-romance-heartbreak-june-carter-vivian-cash-/92772320/
WELL. WELL.
Raymond Alvin Wildman Liberto. Ray was the son of Irene Robinson and Thomas Liberto. Ray was the brother of Vivian Liberto Cash
SG2…
I looked at that picture and said..
Johnny Cash’s first wife was BLACK??
I mean, this was pre-Loving.
I, um…..it was obvious to me..but, I thought I knew Cash’s life story, so I thought, of course, I’d know about a BLACK WIFE.
wow.
UH HUH
SG2, LOL @ “I WALK the Line” Johnny Cash!
Roseann Cash is the image of her mom. Johnny and Vivian had beautiful girls together.
I’m pretty sure that “Johnny Cash at San Quentin” is the first album of his that I heard. My friend’s brother had just come home from his first tour of duty in Vietnam and, of course, he bought a stereo. He would let us play his records when he wasn’t home and that is the only one I remember. I used to play “Darling Companion” over and over.
Later, when Rosanne Cash started recording, I did know about Vivian but not anything about her ancestry. I just noticed that RC looks exactly like her mother.
Well, if she’s passing, okay then. Whatever.
Also a favorite from that album, written by Bob Dylan…
Rosanne…
I was shocked, Liza. I didn’t even know Vivian existed. All I ever heard about was June Cash.
Yeah, Vivian got kind of a raw deal. Her book might be interesting.
I cried laughing at the comments in one article about her. White people were screaming…”She’s Italian”. I was hollaring and said OK THEN!
This would have been the 1950s, so I’m not surprised. A lot of folks were passing.
When I met my first husband’s father, I said to my husband, “I didn’t know your dad is biracial”. Answer, “Yeah, we don’t talk about it”. His dad was born in Alabama in the 1920’s, left the Confederacy during WWII and never went back, passed his whole life.
https://twitter.com/rosannecash/status/888372812439793665
https://twitter.com/BlakKofee/status/888384717770432513
LOL There’s so much POWER in being Black, some folks can’t handle it.
https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/888390404432945153
Damn, like “Black” is a dirty word…. Walk the Line was part ‘MYTHICAL” HUH?
Actually, from everything Ive read on this subject, Johnny Cash wasnt the one lying and insisting she was Italian, Vivian and her family did that. If she was black (and she certainly does have that odd look to her) apparently she was so ashamed of it she went to her grave denying it, weird.
How is looking black an odd look? There is nothing odd about my blackness. I don’t blame Vivian. I think it was Johnny’s handlers who probably started it. IMO..they discredited her in every way they could.
ODD comment. “You must be exotic looking.” You know without that MELANIN.
Don’t come here trying to smear Vivian with that ISH.