Coca-Cola denies its ad copied Johnny Cash's voice in an ELVIS Act case with no AI in it

Coca-Cola has filed its answer to the Johnny Cash estate's lawsuit over a college-football commercial. In the answer filed on 8 May 2026, the company admits the ad includes a sound recording with "a male singing voice" and that the voice is not Cash's. It denies that the ad infringes anything, and it rejects the estate's description of the vocalist as a "Sound-Alike Singer". Music Business Worldwide reported the filing on 14 May.

It is the highest-profile case we know of under Tennessee's ELVIS Act, a law sold as protection against AI voice clones. There is no AI in it. It is about a human singer who performs as Johnny Cash for a living, and the court's answer will matter to every vocalist who gets hired to sound "like" someone.

What does the estate claim?

According to the complaint, filed on 25 November 2025 by the John R. Cash Revocable Trust:

• Around 20 August 2025, Coca-Cola launched a college-football campaign called "Fan Work Is Thirsty Work". Its TV spot, "Go the Distance", ran on networks including ABC, NBC, FOX and ESPN.
• Coca-Cola's ad agency commissioned an original song and hired a Johnny Cash tribute singer to perform it. The complaint says the singer bills himself as "The No. 1 Johnny Cash Tribute Show", and argues he was chosen so the ad would sound as close as possible to Cash.
• The trust says Coca-Cola never asked it for a licence. It also points to its own licensing history: Cash recordings have run in Super Bowl ads with its permission.
• The trust sues under the ELVIS Act, the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and the federal Lanham Act's false-endorsement provision. It wants damages, Coca-Cola's profits from the ad, punitive and treble damages, and an injunction against the ad.

The complaint concedes outright that the voice in the ad "is not the actual Voice of Johnny Cash". Neither the complaint nor the answer mentions artificial intelligence.

What does Coca-Cola admit and deny?

The answer admits a fair amount. Coca-Cola hired an agency for a fall 2025 football campaign, the ad used an original composition, a vocal artist was hired to sing it, and that singer "appears to have a website" with the tribute-show language the estate quotes. It denies the allegations that the voice sounds remarkably like Cash's and that it is readily identifiable as his.

It also lists eleven defences. They include that the trust lacks standing, that the claims are barred by the First Amendment, that federal law pre-empts the state-law claims, that there was no wilful infringement, and that the trust suffered no provable injury. It asks the court to dismiss every claim with prejudice. Lists like this are standard in an answer, so they tell you which arguments Coca-Cola is keeping open, not which ones it will push hardest.

The case is still early. A joint filing from July shows the court issued an initial case management order on 5 March 2026, and that the parties have asked for more time to amend their pleadings. The docket shows a jury trial set for 7 December 2027.

Why the ELVIS Act matters here

When Governor Bill Lee signed the act in March 2024, his office framed it as a first-of-its-kind update to Tennessee's personal-rights law. The old law, it said, didn't address "personalized generative AI cloning models and services that enable human impersonation". The definition that made it into the statute is broader than that pitch. As quoted in the complaint, a protected "voice" is "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" of it.

"Simulation" isn't limited to software. On the estate's reading, a skilled human impersonator counts as one. The complaint also leans on Midler v. Ford, a 1988 Ninth Circuit voice case, quoting the court's line that to impersonate a singer's voice "is to pirate her identity". So the estate is presenting the ELVIS Act as a written-down version of an older idea: a famous voice belongs to its owner, whoever or whatever reproduces it.

What session singers and tribute acts should take from this

Most of this case is a dispute between an estate and a global brand. The person most exposed by its outcome is neither of them. It's the working vocalist.

The ELVIS Act's liability section, as quoted in the complaint, covers anyone who "knowingly uses" a person's voice to advertise products without consent. It also covers anyone who makes that voice available to the public knowing the use wasn't authorised. The trust has sued only Coca-Cola. But the quoted wording isn't limited to brands. The act has exemptions we haven't been able to review in the enacted text, and whether any would protect a hired singer is untested.

Until the court rules, some practical steps make sense:

• Read the brief, literally. A brief that says "in the style of [named artist]" or "make it sound like" is now a legal risk as well as a creative one. Ask the agency or producer in writing whether the artist or their estate has licensed the use.
• Get an indemnity. If a client wants an impression for an ad, your contract should say the client cleared it and will cover you if it didn't. Session fees are rarely large enough to justify carrying that risk yourself.
• Keep tribute and advertising separate. Performing as an artist on stage, where the audience knows it's a tribute show, is a different situation from lending that voice to sell a product. This case is about the second.

Public reaction from working singers has been thin. We looked for discussion from session vocalists and tribute performers and found little, and we couldn't open the X posts our research flagged. So this section is our reading of the filings, not a report of what singers are saying.

What we think

Voice rights only protect artists if they are precise, and the ELVIS Act's key phrase, "readily identifiable and attributable", isn't precise yet. This case will give it its first real definition, and the facts are unusually stark. On the estate's account, a professional Cash impersonator sang a new song for a soft-drink ad without a licence. If that is what happened, it is the kind of deliberate trading on someone's identity the law should stop, AI or not.

The risk is the next case with weaker facts. A baritone with some of Cash's twang. A country singer whose phrasing owes a lot to Cash, as plenty do. If "identifiable" ends up meaning "reminds some listeners of", the law will chill the session singers it claims to protect while doing little against anonymous AI clones, which are harder to trace and sue. We'd like the court to tie liability to deliberate imitation plus commercial use, and to treat a resemblance in genre or style as fair game. Agencies that want a famous voice should pay for the famous voice. Singers who simply sound like the tradition they come from shouldn't need a lawyer to take a gig.