Vivian Cash, Johnny Cash's first wife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Cash
I never knew this, likewise, Patsy Cline, along with a number of other celebrities likely had some African-American heritage in her background.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0J9cYRRaLs
I knew that he was previously married before June Carter Cash but not much else.
Her last name was "Liberto" and her uncle was a Priest; they lived in San Antonio; so perhaps she is part Italian?
Vivian Liberto was a dark-featured, sexy looking woman of Italian, Dutch, and English background. Some time in 1966,
a white supremacist group known as the National States' Rights Party, based in Alabama, jumped on a photograph
of Cash and Vivian leaving court after an early Cash drug bust. The photo was grainy, making some who saw it
think the dark-featured Vivian was indeed African-American. The NSRP published the photograph with that headline,
"Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash's Negro Wife," in its broadsheet
The Thunderbolt. There's the possibility that the
NSRP really wanted to hit back at Cash because of his concurrent single, "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," Native Americans
being no more loved by white supremacists than African-Americans.
Cash himself once believed the Ku Klux Klan was behind the rumour. Cash himself had no racial prejudice after he was
disabused of it swiftly enough during his Air Force hitch, over an incident involving a black airman and a white woman.
Things I have read since seeing the film
Walk the Line convince me Vivian Cash wasn't anywhere near the
shrew she was shown to be in that film. (Whose veracity I knew to question the moment I saw how it depicted
Cash's inspiration for writing "I Walk the Line"---and it wasn't June Carter finding them as layabouts and demanding
they walk the line, either.) Until Cash's drug use began to spiral out of control (he took them to keep up with a
punishing road schedule until it got completely out of hand), he had a happy first marriage and his wife had no
trouble at all with his career. To the day she died (in 2005) Vivian Liberto swore that without the drugs entering
the picture she believed her husband wouldn't have strayed. And Johnny Cash himself said his drug addiction
cost him his first wife.
from their marriage.
Did you now: Vivian and Johnny Cash named their daughter Roseanne after . . . Cash's affectionate nicknames for
Vivian's breasts---he called one "Rose" and the other "Anne" . . .
