Many obituaries for Kris Kristofferson, the singer and movie star who died last week at the age of 88, noted his importance to the “outlaw country” movement of the 1970s. Along with musicians like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Kristofferson moved country music away from a more polished Nashville sound and incorporated more Americana into his music. Like many of the aforementioned, Kristofferson also developed a reputation for some rough and rowdy ways—he legendarily worked as a janitor in Nashville while trying to break into the music business, briefly dated Janis Joplin and once landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn in the hopes of attracting Cash’s attention.
Less mentioned was that Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar, a literary wunderkind who was already publishing fiction in The Atlantic as a college student and was the lyricist behind many songs made famous by more prominent voices. Kristofferson was also—hear me out on this—a man for whom religious faith was an important part of his life.
Born in Brownsville, Tex., in 1936, Kristofferson graduated from San Mateo High School and then attended Pomona College, where he was a star athlete and published his short fiction in various journals. After graduation in 1958, he attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Part of a military family, Kristofferson joined the Army after Oxford and was trained as a helicopter pilot and stationed in West Germany.
After leaving the Army in 1965 to pursue a career as a songwriter, Kristofferson moved to Nashville and worked as a custodian and a commercial helicopter pilot. While he released a single here and there, his music didn’t truly register with the public in those years unless it was covered by others: Ray Stevens’s version of the hangover confessional “Sunday Morning Coming Down” was a minor hit in 1969, and both Roger Miller and Gordon Lightfoot had success with covers of “Me and Bobby McGee.” (That’s right, Kristofferson wrote it, and Bobby McGee is a woman.)
Kristofferson began to get more notice when Johnny Cash brought him onstage during a set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969. In 1971, the famous cover of “Me and Bobby McGee” by his former girlfriend Janis Joplin appeared on her posthumous album and became an international hit. The lyrics and chords are the same, but Joplin’s sped-up rock n’ roll version radically departs from Kristofferson’s haunting country vision for the song (which is far superior, if you ask me.)
Kristofferson’s second album, “The Silver Tongued Devil and I,” came out that same year and established him as a prominent country music figure—and introduced the world to the beautiful song “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).” He started his acting career around the same time, appearing in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie.” Kristofferson won a Grammy for country music song of the year in 1972 for another song endlessly covered, “Help Me Make It Through The Night.”
America did not cover Kristofferson’s music over the years, though his acting performances did warrant mention, including a spicy 1977 review of the remake of “A Star Is Born,” starring Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand. “The less said about A Star Is Born the better,” wrote reviewer Richard Blake, S.J. “It is a noisy bore—and that, from a once hopeless Barbra Streisand addict, now cured forever.” Father Blake didn’t have much to say about Kristofferson, but wrote of Streisand: “She wanted to make a megalomaniac monstrosity, and she succeeded. It should be banished to the Arctic.”
1972’s album “Jesus Was a Capricorn” featured one of Kristofferson’s most explicitly religious songs, “Why Me.” Written after an experience at a Christian church where Kristofferson found himself asking for help from God in a period of depression, guilt and despair, the song has been covered by many other artists and is Kristofferson’s only #1 hit. Music historian Bill Malone described the song as a religious retelling of “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” writing in 1990 that Kristofferson “sounds like a man who has lived a lot but is now humbling himself before God.” Among the lyrics:
Maybe, Lord
I can show someone else
What I've been through myself
On my way back to you.
Kristofferson continued to act and release music through the 1980s and 1990s, and was for many years a member of the country supergroup “The Highwaymen,” with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He also became more involved in progressive political causes, something not always appreciated by other country music stars—Ethan Hawke once related a (possibly apocryphal) tale of Kristofferson almost fighting Toby Keith over politics in Rolling Stone.
In 1989, in the wake of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two others by Salvadoran paramilitaries, Kristofferson joined the peace activist John Dear, musicians including Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne and 12,000 protestors at a rally in front of San Francisco’s City Hall to decry the U.S. government’s continued funding of El Salvador’s military dictatorship, one of many causes to which he contributed time and energy.
When Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 to protest abuse in the Catholic Church, she became a pariah in the world of entertainment. Two weeks later, Kristofferson introduced her at a concert celebrating the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album—where O’Connor faced a chorus of boos. Kristofferson returned to the stage and put his arm around O’Connor, telling her “don’t let the bastards get you down.” (You can watch the two sing “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” 18 years later, here.)
My favorite Kris Kristofferson song—indeed, one of my favorite songs by any artist ever—is his 1971 composition, “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.” Kristofferson offered a long list of suggestions of who the song was about, including Johnny Cash or Dennis Hopper, but I’ve always thought the pilgrim in question was Kristofferson himself. “He’s a poet, he’s a picker,” Kristofferson sings. “He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher. He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned.”
I heard him sing it live once, at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 2011. I thought of him singing these lines when I heard of his death:
And he keeps right on a’changin’ for the better or the worse
Searching for a shrine he’s never found
Never knowing if believing is a blessing or a curse
Or if the going up was worth the coming down.
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Gibbous Moon,” by Alfred Nicol. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
