Kris Kristofferson, 1936-2024

The legendary singer, songwriter, and actor is gone at 88.

New York Times, “Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.

His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.

Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.

[…]

Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.

Steeped in a neo-Romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose/Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free,” he wrote in “Me and Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin, with whom Mr. Kristofferson was briefly involved romantically, had a posthumous No. 1 single with her plaintive recording of the song in 1971.

Later that year “Help Me Make It Through the Night” became a No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hit in a heart-stopping performance by Sammi Smith. The composition won Mr. Kristofferson a Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year in 1972.

It was a heady time to be a songwriter in Nashville, where Mr. Kristofferson fell in with a gifted circle of like-minded — and similarly bacchanalian — tunesmiths who were as driven to succeed as he was, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson among them.

“We took it seriously enough to think that our work was important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture,” Mr. Kristofferson said in an interview with the journal No Depression in 2006.

“Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the ’20s,” he went on, alluding to American expatriate writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who lived there at the time. “Real creative and real exciting — and intense.”

Rolling Stone, “Kris Kristofferson, Songwriter Whose Poetic Lyrics Transcended Genre, Dead at 88

As the songwriter of legendary compositions like “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” Kris Kristofferson transformed lyrics into literature, elevating the craft to a legitimate American art form in a way few had done before. Part Romantic poet, part folk troubadour, part country-music storyteller, Kristofferson died Saturday at the age of 88.

[…]

Songwriting was merely one aspect to the Renaissance man, who was also a Golden Globe-winning actor, Golden Gloves boxer, Rhodes scholar, author, U.S. Army veteran, pilot, and onetime record-label janitor. But it was his penetrating lyricism that caused a seismic shift in the perception of country music by the late Sixties. Well-educated (with a military discipline) though he was, he quickly fell in with the freshman class of “outlaw” singer-songwriters that would buck the star system and influence generations to come.

The eldest of three children, Kristoffer Kristofferson was born June 22, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas. His father, Lars, the son of a Swedish army veteran, was a pilot and a major general in the U.S. Air Force who went on to work for Pan American Airways. The family moved frequently, settling in San Mateo, California, when Kristofferson was in junior high. A model student who earned the nickname “Straight Arrow,” he graduated from high school in San Mateo in 1954, and went on to study creative writing at Pomona College, winning several prizes in a short-story contest sponsored by Atlantic Monthly magazine. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1958, he received a Rhodes scholarship to England’s Oxford University.

Although intent on becoming a novelist, Kristofferson concentrated his studies on the poetry of William Blake, and penned and performed his first songs while studying at Oxford’s Merton College. In England, he cut his first singles (credited to “Kris Carson”) for Top Rank Records, although they went unreleased at the time. After earning a master’s degree in English literature from Oxford in 1960, Kristofferson, who planned to resume his studies there, flew home to California for Christmas break. Reuniting with an old girlfriend, Fran Beir, the couple married and had a daughter, Tracy, and a son, Kris. Instead of returning to Oxford, Kristofferson enlisted in the Army.

Kristofferson served as a helicopter pilot while in the Army and attained the rank of captain. During a three-year tour in West Germany (with his wife and daughter in tow), he organized a band, learning the Bob Dylan songs as recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary (his band’s Dobro player gave him the folk trio’s LPs). On leave in the spring of 1965, Kristofferson took his first trip to Nashville. He had been tapped for a position teaching English literature at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after leaving West Germany, but his two weeks in Nashville scuttled that plan. He became enamored of the songwriting circle, befriending songwriter and music publisher Marijohn Wilkin (“The Long Black Veil”), Bobby Bare (“Detroit City”), and producer Cowboy Jack Clement.

[…]

Kristofferson and his family settled in Nashville, where he continued to write songs. He took a job as janitor at Columbia Recording Studios (“Emptying ashtrays and sweeping floors,” he described it), in addition to working as a part-time helicopter pilot flying back and forth between offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. A story about how he once landed his helicopter in Johnny Cash’s yard to give the country star his demo tape would become country-music apocryphal.

[…]

In 1969, Carl Perkins gave up a prime opening slot for Cash so that Kristofferson could make his Newport Folk Festival debut, with Cash introducing him. The Man in Black also let him hang around backstage at his weekly ABC show, which was being filmed at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. There, Kristofferson mingled with artists and hustled his songwriting demos. By the turn of the decade, a whirlwind of recognition as both a songwriter and artist was underway. Signed by Fred Foster to Monument Records in 1970, Kristofferson released his eponymous LP, which featured new originals as well as some of his familiar hits for other artists. Although a Top 10 chart hit, the LP was otherwise unsuccessful.

After his sophomore release, 1971’s The Silver Tongued Devil and I, sold more briskly, Kristofferson’s debut album was rereleased as Me & Bobby McGee, capitalizing on the success of the title song, a posthumous Number One pop hit for Janis Joplin. Kristofferson and Joplin shared her house in Mill Valley, California, for a while, where jam sessions with fellow musicians, actors, and others were commonplace. (He played the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1970, sharing the final day’s bill with Jimi Hendrix, who would die from an overdose just a few weeks later.)

In 1970, Ray Price released his countrypolitan recording of Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” which helped the composition win the Academy of Country Music’s Song of the Year. Cash’s version of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” secured the Song of the Year award that same year from the Country Music Association. Kristofferson’s double win for Song of the Year in 1970 marked the only time a single individual has ever won the same award from the ACM and CMA in the same year for two different songs.

[…]

Simultaneous to his commercial breakthrough in music, Kristofferson made his film debut in Dennis Hopper’s 1971 film The Last Movie. A commercial and critical disaster, it was followed by the lead role in Cisco Pike, which also starred Gene Hackman, Karen Black, and musician Doug Sahm. In 1973, Kristofferson married his second wife, singer Rita Coolidge, and the couple had a daughter, Casey. His film work continued with an appearance in Cash’s The Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus, and he played an unemployed musician in Blume in Love. His role as Billy in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which also starred Bob Dylan, earned Kristofferson a BAFTA award nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. In 1974, he co-starred with Ellen Burstyn in the Oscar-winning Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese.

But two of Kristofferson’s most noteworthy early film roles were surrounded by publicity that somewhat obscured his exceptional performances. A controversial Playboy spread with co-star Sarah Miles accompanied the erotic 1976 drama The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. That same year, he shared the screen with Barbra Streisand in the rock & roll reboot of A Star Is Born. The third-most profitable film of the year, it was nonetheless savaged by critics, with Streisand and Kristofferson’s volatile on-set clashes becoming the stuff of Hollywood legend.

Variety, “Kris Kristofferson, Country Music Legend and ‘A Star Is Born’ Leading Man, Dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, who attained success as both a groundbreaking country music singer-songwriter and a Hollywood film and TV star, died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii.

[…]

Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, “Kris Kristofferson believed to his core that creativity is God-given, and that those who ignore or deflect such a holy gift are doomed to failure and unhappiness. He preached that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul, and then he created a body of work that gave voice not only to his soul but to ours. Kris’s heroes included the prize fighter Muhammad Ali, the great poet William Blake, and the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare,’ Hank Williams. He lived his life in a way that honored and exemplified the values of each of those men, and he leaves a righteous, courageous and resounding legacy that rings with theirs.”

Kristofferson had already spent several modestly successful years in Music City’s song mills by the time he broke through as the author of such No. 1 country hits as “For the Good Times” (Ray Price, 1970), “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (Johnny Cash, 1970) and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Sammi Smith, 1971). His song “Me and Bobby McGee” became a posthumous No. 1 pop hit for his former paramour Janis Joplin in 1971.

His first four albums for Monument Records, which showcased his rough, unmannered singing and poetically crafted, proto-outlaw country songs, all reached the country top 10, and 1972’s “Jesus Was a Capricorn,” which contained his No. 1 country hit “Why Me,” topped the country LP chart. He won three Grammys: for best country song (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and a pair of duets with Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973-80.

Bill C. Malone noted in “Country Music, U.S.A.,” the standard history of the genre, “Kristofferson’s lyrics spoke often of loneliness, alienation and pain, but they also celebrated freedom and honest relationships, and in intimate, sensuous language that had been rare to country music.”

Kristofferson could be the first to knock his own voice. “I don’t think I’m that good a singer,” he said in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. “I can’t think of a song that I’ve written that I don’t like the way somebody else sings it better.” But with many of his signature songs, fans would not have wanted them channeled through any other voice, least of all one that smoothed out their raw sentiments.

Los Angeles Times, “Kris Kristofferson, singer-songwriter who changed country music, dies at 88”

He disliked being called a poet and thought, more or less accurately, that he sang like a barking bullfrog, but Kris Kristofferson did more to change country music than a legion of golden-throated balladeers.

“You can look at Nashville, pre-Kris and post-Kris,” Bob Dylan once said. “Because he changed everything.”

Meticulously crafting songs that were mournful and fatalistic without being mawkish, Kristofferson invited listeners to share the regrets of a man who let his lover slip away in “Me and Bobby McGee.” The ache of a lonely nighthawk seeking a friend to “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Rolling Stone magazine said his influence ranged well beyond the confines of country music, calling him simply “one of the greatest songwriters of all time.”

[…]

In a rush to equip himself with all the trappings of the conventional life he thought he should live, he married his childhood sweetheart, had a daughter, enlisted in the Army and was deployed to Germany as a helicopter pilot. After he was discharged, the Pentagon offered him a teaching position at West Point. It was a career-making honor, but Kristofferson decided to first stop in Nashville to see if he could sell songs he’d been working on with Army buddies in a band he named the Losers.

It took just two weeks to change his path once more, this time for good. “I fell in love with the whole life, of songwriters hanging out writing songs to each other,” he said. He turned down the West Point offer and moved to Nashville.

“It was pretty scary,” he recalled decades later.

It also was deeply unpopular with his family. His mother disowned him, writing that whatever he achieved would never measure up to the “tremendous disappointment you’ve always been.” It was an awful sentiment, but Kristofferson felt something he’d never experienced as the dutiful, high-achieving son: freedom. The search for freedom, and the suffering that came along with his refusal to meet the expectations of others, would lie at the heart of his art.

“He’s unmanageable,” his third wife, Lisa Meyers, would later say. He backed out of a lucrative contract for his autobiography rather than accept a deadline imposed by the publisher. “Even if someone tells him to have a good day, he’ll say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’” Meyers said.

The years of struggle on Music Row did little to validate Kristofferson’s choice to throw over his military career. To support his family, he took side jobs, from bartender to helicopter pilot, transporting workers to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Finally fed up with the meanness of their life, his first wife, Frances Beer, left him and took their young daughter. He captured the misery of that time in one of his most heartfelt songs, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt / And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.”

“Sunday was the worst day of the week if you didn’t have a family,” he said. “I was just writing about what I was going through.”

He hadn’t yet bottomed out. That came when the run-down room he was renting for $50 a month was broken into and his few possessions stolen. Once again, with the loss came the feeling of liberation, that he didn’t have “any expectations or anything to live up to.”

There was only one way to go, up.

By this time, he had caught on with Columbia Records, not as a performer but studio set-up man. In a tale he enjoyed telling over the years, he said he was essentially a janitor, emptying the ashtrays for the likes of Johnny Cash, Dylan and other performers doing what he wanted to do. It was menial work, but it gave him the chance to pitch his songs to Cash through intermediaries. Cash, he was told, liked the songs but didn’t record any.

Finally, Kristofferson decided to take desperate measures, flying a helicopter to Cash’s home and landing in his backyard. When the singer emerged to see what was going on, Kristofferson handed him a demo tape. “I’d pitched him every song I ever wrote, so he knew who I was,” Kristofferson said in 2008. “But it was still kind of an invasion of privacy that I wouldn’t recommend.”

I’ve often joked that the thing for which Kristofferson was best known, singing, was the thing he was least good at. And he was a pretty fair singer.

But what an extraordinary career. Golden Gloves boxer. Rhodes Scholar. Army Ranger. Helicopter pilot. Winner of four Grammys and nominated for another ten. Golden Globe-winning actor. Offhand, it’s hard to think of anyone who has been more accomplished across so many fields.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Sleeping Dog says:

    Yes, KK was a rare breed. Looking at his resumé, you would think it was a bit of puffery. A song writer of classics. RIP.

  2. inhumans99 says:

    You have to love Kris’s career, if you were not into country music, love stories, or Barbara Streisand you might still have come to appreciate the man if you were say…into comic books.

    I love that Kris played Blades father figure Whistler in Wesley Snipes Blade trilogy. He was a perfect fit in the role. It has been a minute since I watched Lonestar, but a lot of folks also loved his role in that great film.

    RIP to a man who was loved by many.

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  3. SC_Birdflyte says:

    One of his songs that has always appealed to me is “Fallen Angel,” which contains some wonderful words: “And I can say I’m not sorry for the way we tried to be But I’m afraid what we make of it is up to you and me.” Acknowledge regret, but go forward.

  4. Neil Hudelson says:

    “I’d trade all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday” is one of those lines that make you stop cold the first time you hear it.

  5. Jay L Gischer says:

    Dad had a tape of Kris himself singing some of these songs. We played it quite a bit. It’s a reminder to me of how different country music was in those days – it really didn’t have a lot of political valence.

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  6. Mr. Prosser says:

    Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris. The Mount Rushmore of Outlaw Country.

  7. Franklin says:

    Not a country fan, I’m sure I saw him in some movies, but what I just learned about him earned some respect. When the rest of the world was trying to boo Sinead O’Connor off the stage, he stood up for her.

  8. dazedandconfused says:

    The man was a writer, and raised the bar for C&W writing. His backhanded tribute to his flight instructor is a little known “hit” of his..outside of aviation circles.

  9. Stormy Dragon says:

    My favorite Kristofferson song is “To Beat the Devil”. It gives me the determination to keep moving forward when things seem hopeless

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