Coca-Cola filed its formal answer to the Johnny Cash estate’s lawsuit on May 8, denying that a singer used in the company’s college football-themed commercial infringed on the late country icon’s voice rights. The answer, filed in the US District Court in Nashville, sets up what is shaping up to be a significant test case for Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, the first major voice rights lawsuit filed under the statute since it was enacted in 2024.
The John R. Cash Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in November 2025, alleging that Coca-Cola’s ad agency hired a professional Johnny Cash tribute performer named Shawn Barker to record vocals for the company’s “Go the Distance” commercial, part of its Fan Work Is Thirsty Work campaign for the NCAA college football season. The ad began airing in August 2025 and ran on ABC, NBC, FOX, ESPN, TNT, TBS, and other networks, which Coca-Cola confirmed in its answer. The trust alleged that Barker, who advertises himself as “The No. 1 Johnny Cash Tribute Show” and “The Man in Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash,” was specifically hired to make the vocal track sound “as close as possible” to Cash’s voice. The estate’s complaint stated that “the singing voice in the Infringing Ad is readily identifiable and attributable to Johnny Cash” and that some consumers “have actually been confused” by the ad. Lawcommentary
Coca-Cola’s answer denied all of that. The company acknowledged that the ad contained “a male singing voice” and confirmed it aired across the named networks, but flatly denied that the voice was a sound-alike and rejected the estate’s characterization of it as an “Infringing Ad.” “TCCC admits that the singing voice included in the Advertisement is not the voice of Johnny Cash,” the filing reads, before denying “the allegations embedded in the defined term ‘Sound-Alike Singer.'” On damages, Coca-Cola argued the trust “failed to take reasonable action to minimize any damages allegedly sustained” and is therefore barred from recovering damages that could have been avoided. The company also raised First Amendment grounds, lack of standing, and federal preemption as affirmative defenses against the state law claims.
The legal framework at the center of the case is Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, formally the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, signed into law in March 2024. The statute protects a person’s voice from nonconsensual commercial exploitation, defining voice broadly as “a sound in a medium that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation.” That last clause is the operative language here. Whether or not Barker’s voice is an actual simulation of Cash’s in the technical sense, the estate argues it is readily identifiable as Cash’s by ordinary listeners, which is what the statute requires. The trust is also bringing claims under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and the federal Lanham Act, both of which Coca-Cola denied in its answer.
Cash, who died in 2003, sold more than 90 million records worldwide and was inducted into the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music halls of fame. The estate does license his intellectual property commercially, including uses of his songs “Ragged Old Flag” and “Personal Jesus” in Super Bowl telecasts, which the trust cited as evidence that Coca-Cola could have sought a license and simply chose not to. The complaint’s core argument is that Coca-Cola “knows that it needs a license to exploit, for commercial advertising purposes, the name, image, likeness, and voice of artists and musicians,” has obtained such licenses in the past, and in this case “never even bothered to ask.” The case connects directly to the broader artist likeness and voice rights landscape that has accelerated significantly as AI tools have made voice replication easier and brand exploitation of artist identity more common. The Dua Lipa lawsuit against Samsungand the FKA Twigs case both reflect the same pattern of artists and estates aggressively protecting commercial identity rights. The ELVIS Act gives Tennessee-based estates a particularly strong statutory tool to do so, and the Cash case will test how far that protection extends when the alleged infringement involves a human tribute performer rather than AI. Lawcommentary
