Born: June 22nd, 1936
Died: September, 28th, 2024
Kris Kristofferson, who has died aged 88 in Maui, Hawaii, was a singer-songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candour and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies.
Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with For the Good Times, a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart in the US and reached the top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His Sunday Morning Coming Down became a No1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.
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Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:
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.
Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, Sunday Morning Coming Dow gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the song’s chorus describes the desolation its protagonist is experiencing.
Hundreds of artists have recorded Kristofferson’s songs – among them Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, 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 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 Kristofferson a Grammy Award for country song of the year in 1972.
It was a heady time to be a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where 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,” Kristofferson said in an interview with the magazine 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 such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who lived there at the time. “Real creative and real exciting – and intense.”
Kristofferson’s own raspy, at times pitch-indifferent vocals never quite gained traction with commercial radio. One notable exception was the gospel-suffused Why Me, a No 1 country and top 40 pop hit in 1973. (Another gospel song of his, One Day at a Time, written with Marijohn Wilkin, was a No 1 country single for singer Christy Lane in 1980.)
Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, who were married for much of the 1970s, won Grammy Awards for From the Bottle to the Bottom (1973) and Lover Please (1975). They also appeared in movies together, including Sam Peckinpah’s gritty 1973 western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, in which Kristofferson played the outlaw Billy the Kid. Peckinpah cast Kristofferson in his film after seeing him perform at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, and after he saw him in Cisco Pike (1972), his big-screen debut.
Martin Scorsese then cast Kristofferson, whose rugged good looks lent themselves to the big screen, as the laconic male lead, alongside Ellen Burstyn, in the critically acclaimed 1974 drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. He later starred opposite Barbra Streisand in Frank Pierson’s remake of A Star Is Born, a performance for which he won a Golden Globe Award in 1977.
Over four decades Kristofferson acted in more than 50 movies, among them the 1980 box-office failure Heaven’s Gate and John Sayles’s Oscar-nominated 1996 neo-western Lone Star. Singer-songwriters may not be the likeliest of movie stars, but Kristofferson consistently revealed a magnetism and command on-screen that made him an exception to the rule.
Kristofferson’s last big hit as a recording artist was The Highwayman, a No 1 country single in 1985 by The Highwaymen, an outlaw-country supergroup that also included his long-time friends Waylon Jennings, Nelson and Cash.
Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, had played a pivotal role in Kristofferson’s budding career when they invited him to appear with them at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969. Kristofferson was still a scuffling songwriter at the time, having worked as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville, where he later recalled emptying ashtrays and waste paper baskets during the 1966 sessions for Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.
Immobilised by stage fright at Newport that night, Kristofferson might have squandered his opportunity had it not been for the encouragement of Carter Cash, who, as her husband recalled in interviews, all but dragged him onstage with them.
The evening proved propitious, exposing Kristofferson to a national audience. “If there was one thing that got my performing career started, that was it right there,” Kristofferson said, reflecting on the experience as quoted in the 2013 book Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville, by Michael Streissguth.
Kristoffer Kristofferson was born June 22nd, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas, the eldest of three children of Mary Ann (Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Kristofferson. His father, a major general in the US air force, strongly urged him to pursue a military career. The family later moved west, and in 1954 Kristofferson graduated from San Mateo High School in northern California, where he distinguished himself in both academics and athletics. He was subsequently featured as a promising boxer in Sports Illustrated’s Faces in the Crowd series in 1958.
Kristofferson graduated with honours with a degree in literature from Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1958. He also had prize-winning entries in a collegiate short-story contest sponsored by The Atlantic magazine before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford. Under the pseudonym Kris Carson, he made a fruitless bid to become a pop star while there.
Kristofferson graduated from Merton College, Oxford, in 1960 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the US army. In 1961 he married Frances Beer and was stationed in Germany, where he served as a helicopter pilot. He attained the rank of captain in 1965 and received an appointment to teach English at West Point. He ultimately declined the position, trading the comforts it might have afforded for the penury of life as a would-be songwriter in Nashville.
Success in Nashville initially eluded Kristofferson, and not without reason. According to Wilkin, the first publisher to sign him to a songwriting deal, he had a few things to learn – and unlearn – before he arrived at the distinctive mix of vernacular and sophisticated idioms that became his stock in trade. “He had been a poet and an English teacher, so his songs were too long and too perfect,” Wilkin said in a 2003 interview with Nashville Scene. “His grammar was too perfect. He had to learn the way people talk.”
Kristofferson’s eponymously titled debut, released in 1970, contained versions of several songs that had been hits for other artists, including Me and Bobby McGee, for which Foster was credited as a co-writer. (That song was originally recorded by Roger Miller, who had a Top 20 country hit with it in 1969.)
Kristofferson released other albums, to mixed reviews; by decade’s end his career in movies had begun to eclipse his reputation as a singer-songwriter. The 1980s and 1990s saw his music take an activist turn, with lyrics championing social justice and human rights.
Bypass surgery in 1999 slowed Kristofferson down, as did an extended bout with Lyme disease in the decade that followed, but he remained active into his 80s.
He also befriended singer Sinéad O’Connor, following her infamous Saturday Night Live appearance in October 1992 where she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.
Days later, in the midst of the backlash, Kristofferson introduced O’Connor as an “artist whose name’s become synonymous with courage and integrity”, as she took to the stage to jeering and booing at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden. In a show of solidarity, Kristofferson came back on stage to offer O’Connor some words of comfort.
Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. By that time he had already been elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1977) and the National Academy of Popular Music’s Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1985). He also received a lifetime achievement honour at the 2014 Grammy Awards.
Kristofferson is survived by Lisa (Meyers) Kristofferson, his wife of over 40 years, their sons, Jesse, Jody, Johnny and Blake, and a daughter, Kelly Marie; a son, Kris, and daughter, Tracy, from his marriage to Beer; and a daughter, Casey, from his marriage to Coolidge; and seven grandchildren. – The New York Times
2024 The New York Times Company
