On August 7, 1954, Johnny Cash, fresh from his stint in Germany as a member of the U.S. Air Force, settled down into a new life with a wife, a steady job, and a little girl on the way, whom they would name Rosanne. Indeed, the road he was staring down that summer was a far cry from the life of fame, fortune, traveling, and debauchery he’d stumble into years later.
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As a rural Arkansas native accustomed to working hard for meager fare, Cash undoubtedly felt like the path he had chosen that year was the best a man of his station could ask for. Little did he know what lay in wait.
Johnny Cash Settled Down Into a New Life in August 1954
Johnny Cash met his first wife, Vivian Liberto, at an ice skating rink in San Antonio, Texas. Liberto attended high school there. Cash, a recent enlistee in the U.S. Air Force, was training at Brooks Air Force Base before heading out to Germany three weeks later. In those few weeks between meeting Liberto and flying to Europe, Liberto and Cash quickly fell in love. They wrote letters to one another for the three years that Cash was in Germany. One month after Cash’s Independence Day return in 1954, the pair married at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in San Antonio.
Cash and Liberto’s wedding on August 7, 1954, was the start of a new life for the couple. They moved to Memphis, Tennessee, shortly after the wedding, settling down into a new life as they began to build their family. Cash and Liberto were pregnant with their first daughter, Rosanne, within a few months of their marriage. Fortunately, Cash had picked up a job as a door-to-door appliance salesman, which helped support his growing household. In his spare time in the evenings, Cash played music with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, known as the Tennessee Two.
Selling appliances might have paid the bills, but it wasn’t what Cash wanted to do for the rest of his life. Eventually, he worked up the courage to reach out to Sun Records (and by “reach out,” we mean sending multiple letters until he finally waited outside the label headquarters’ doors until owner Sam Phillips showed up). He landed his first record deal with Sun Records in 1955, recording “Hey Porter” and “Cry! Cry! Cry!”
Vivian Liberto Was An Integral Influence Early In His Career
As Johnny Cash’s star rose, his life with and marriage to Vivian Liberto began to disintegrate. She served as an integral influence on Cash early in his career, serving as the key inspiration behind his massive hit, “I Walk the Line.” But the temptations of the music industry—drugs, drinking, other women—began driving a wedge between the young couple. Liberto was busy at home raising their four daughters, while Cash was traveling the country, getting into trouble with the law, and developing a concerningly close relationship with June Carter. They divorced by 1966, twelve years after their intimate wedding in San Antonio.
Cash married Carter in March 1968, confirming what Liberto had always feared to be the case since first meeting the Carter Family sibling: that Cash loved Carter more. And while that time in Cash’s life must have seemed miles and miles away as his new life grew deeper and richer in the latter half of the 20th century, it remained fresh in Liberto’s mind. In the final years of her life, she wrote a memoir detailing her life with Cash—and his transition into a new one. “I should have been relentless at saving it,” Liberto said of her marriage, via the VC Star.
“She’d say, ‘If I only could have traveled with him instead of being here raising four kids, things would have been different,” Liberto’s friend, Alice Smith, told the newspaper. “She said that a lot.”
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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