Culture
Kris Kristofferson, musical rebel and movie star, has died at age 88
By: Melissa Block I NPR
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WASHINGTON, D.C. (NPR) – Kris Kristofferson, who wrote indelible songs about lovers, loners, boozers and a footloose pair of hitchhikers — and who later became a screen star, appearing in dozens of films — has died at age 88.
(Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
According to his representative, the singer, songwriter and actor died peacefully in his home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, Sept. 28, surrounded by family. No cause of death was shared.
Kristofferson made his name as a songwriter in Nashville starting in the late 1960s, penning songs including Me and Bobby McGee, Sunday Morning Coming Down and Help Me Make It Through the Night, which other singers (Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Sammi Smith, respectively) took to the top of the charts.
His fame and sex symbol status grew through his movie roles, most notably when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born.
“I imagined myself into a pretty full life,” Kristofferson told NPR’s Fresh Air in 1999. “I was certainly not equipped, by God, to be a football player, but I got to be one. And I got to be a Ranger, and a paratrooper, and a helicopter pilot, you know, and a boxer, and a lot of things that I don’t think I was built to do. I just imagined ’em.”
Kristofferson won three Grammy awards, two of them for duets with his then-wife Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973-80. His performance in A Star Is Born earned him a Golden Globe in 1976.
In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2014, he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Early on, he found his calling as a writer
Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas to a military family; his father was a major general in the U.S. Air Force. It was there, at age 11, that he wrote his first song, titled I Hate Your Ugly Face. (He included that number as a bonus track on one of his last albums, Closer to the Bone, in 2009.)
At Pomona College in southern California, Kristofferson majored in creative literature. His many diverse talents drew the attention of Sports Illustrated, which highlighted him as one of its “Faces in the Crowd” in 1954. “This dashing young man,” the magazine trumpeted, not only played rugby and varsity football and was a Golden Gloves boxer; he was also sports editor of the college paper, a folk singer, an award-winning writer and an “outstanding” ROTC cadet.
From Pomona, Kristofferson won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, where he dove into the works of Shakespeare and William Blake.
In a 1999 interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, he explained that Blake “was a wonderful example for somebody who wanted to be an artist, because he believed if you were cut out to be one, it was your moral responsibility to be one, or you’d be haunted throughout your life and after death — ’til eternity!”
Perhaps inspired by Blake’s admonition, Kristofferson harbored dreams of writing the Great American Novel. Instead, after Oxford he followed his father into the military, joining the U.S. Army, where he became a helicopter pilot and attained the rank of Captain. Assigned to teach literature at West Point, Kristofferson decided to ditch the Army, and he moved to Nashville to pursue his dream of songwriting.
For that choice, he was disowned by his parents. “They thought that somewhere between Oxford and the Army I had gone crazy,” Kristofferson told Pomona College Magazine in 2004. “My mother said nobody over 14 listens to that kind of stuff anyway…. But I was more and more determined to go that way. And being virtually disowned was kind of liberating for me, because I had nothing left to lose.”
From janitor to hit songwriter
Arriving in Nashville in 1965, Kristofferson got a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios, sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays, while writing songs on the side.
He often compared the creative ferment of Nashville in the ’60s to that of Paris in the ’20s. “When I got there,” he said in the 1999 Fresh Air interview, “it was so different from any life that I’d been in before; just hanging out with these people who stayed up for three or four days at a time, and nights, and were writing songs all the time.”
“I think I wrote four songs during the first week I was there,” he continued. “And it was just so exciting to me. It was like a lifeboat, you know? It was like my salvation.”
The story goes that Kristofferson was so desperate to get his songs into the hands of Johnny Cash that he landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn. In the version Cash used to tell, Kristofferson emerged with a tape in one hand and a beer in the other.
“It’s a great story, and a story that good needs to be believed, even if it’s not true,” quips musician Rodney Crowell, who became Cash’s son-in-law when he married Rosanne Cash. “But, you know, according to John, that literally happened.”
Johnny Cash would turn out to be instrumental in launching Kristofferson’s career, introducing him at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival and inviting him to perform on his television variety show.
His songs were like short stories
Rodney Crowell was one of many young songwriters who were drawn to Nashville by the beacon of Kristofferson’s success. “Because of Kris Kristofferson, a lot of songwriters came into Nashville, came in droves. And I was part of that wave,” he tells NPR.
What set Kristofferson’s music apart, Crowell says, was the way he wove a story and sustained a narrative through his songs. Take “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” for example — a vivid portrait of bleak, hungover loneliness. Crowell calls the song “a beautifully-written short story.”
“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
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt
And I shaved my face and combed my hair and stumbled down the stairs to meet the day”