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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The year was 1970 and Johnny Cash wanted to perform a hangover lament called “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on his primetime television show. ABC network executives were nervous about a line in the song: “I’m wishin’, Lord, that I was stoned.” Couldn’t Mr Cash change “stoned” to “home”? No, Mr Cash would not. As the cameras rolled in the Nashville theatre and the Man in Black delivered the line, he looked up to the balcony where the song’s writer was sitting — Kris Kristofferson.
Kristofferson, who has died aged 88, broke the Nashville mould. Songs such as “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Me and Bobby McGee” brought emotional daring and depth to country music, better known for folksy sentimentality and conservatism. Rarely satisfied with his work, including a successful Hollywood side-career, he was less sure of his achievements than his admirers. They were effusive. According to one of his idols, Bob Dylan: “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”
Born in Texas in 1936, Kristofferson grew up in an officer-class military family. He excelled at sports at his Californian high school and had two prizewinning essays published in The Atlantic magazine. In 1958, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford university to study English literature. There he fell hard for William Blake, from whom he learnt, in Kristofferson’s words, “if you buried your talent, sorrow and desperation would pursue you throughout life”.
He wrote most of a novel while in Britain: its rejection by a New York editor wounded him severely. He also recorded songs in London as Kris Carson, but the “Yank at Oxford”, as he was cornily promoted, came to naught. In 1960, he joined the US army as a helicopter pilot. To his parents’ anger, he left in 1965 to try his hand as a Nashville songwriter. With a young family to support, including medical bills for one of his children, he took an irregular variety of jobs, from oil-rig helicoptering to record-studio janitor.
Country’s great maverick, Johnny Cash, became his mentor. He brought Kristofferson out to perform with him at the Newport folk festival in 1969 and wrote the sleeve notes for his protege’s self-titled debut album the following year. It featured “Me and Bobby McGee”, a beautifully tender elegy about parted hobo lovers, and “Help Me Make It Through the Night”, perhaps the most romantic song about a fleeting sexual encounter ever penned.
Kristofferson could combine vivid characterisation, tantalising scenarios, deep feelings and philosophical epigrams within the brief compass of a song. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” from “Me and Bobby McGee”, was worthy of Dylan. Other country songwriters shared his literary sophistication, such as Bobbie Gentry and Jimmy Webb. But Kristofferson was coloured by rock music and the counterculture too. The singer Merle Haggard called him “Nashville’s own hippie”.
His songs were covered by acts ranging from Frank Sinatra to Janis Joplin. His own recordings, sung in craggy drawl, made him a big star in the 1970s. Alongside the likes of Haggard and Cash, he represented “outlaw country”, a challenge to Nashville’s squaresville character. He and his second wife, the singer Rita Coolidge, were a golden couple who released a series of joint albums until their divorce in 1980.
Kristofferson’s good looks — bearded, tousle-haired, redolent of outdoor ruggedness and late nights indoors — attracted attention from Hollywood, home of the beautiful people. He brought a square-jawed charisma to films by Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese. Music critics complained that acting was a distraction from music, a concern that niggled at him. A persistent sense of discontent (“that old familiar pain,” as he sang in “Best of All Possible Worlds”) fuelled the heavy drinking and infidelities that wrecked his first two marriages.
He sobered up after hitting rock bottom on the set of A Star Is Born in 1976, a box office hit with Barbra Streisand in which he played the lead but hated making. Both his film and music careers headed south in the 1980s, but Kristofferson’s personal life reached a state of calm with marriage to his third wife Lisa Meyers in 1983 (who survives him, as do his eight children). He formed a supergroup, The Highwaymen, with fellow outlaws Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in 1985 and continued working as a solo artist up to 2021.
“Never’s just the echo of forever,” he declared in the song “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends”. The laureate of the break-up song leaves behind an imperishable body of work.
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