Kris Kristofferson meant different things to different people. To many, he was a pioneer of the 1960s country music scene who gave Nashville part of its rich history in that genre. Quite a number remember him as one of those rare singers/actors — Elvis aside — who drove audiences to the cinemas to “see” his music, after buying his albums.
But to himself, he was a songwriter more than anything else. And that’s how he wanted to be known — so much so that, on his passport, under the column for occupation, he put down: “Writer”.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for writing,” Kristofferson said in a 2006 interview with online magazine Country Standard Time.
“I never would have gotten to make records if I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have gotten to tour without it. And I never would’ve been asked to act in a movie if I hadn’t been known as a writer.”
It was one of the revelations that surfaced on September 30th 2024, after news that he had passed at the age of 88, surrounded by family.
Other recollections cited his recordings with hundreds of artists, including great names such Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips — proving the icon Kristofferson himself was.
As The New York Times recounted, Kristoffer Kristofferson was born on June 22, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas, the eldest of three children of Mary Ann (Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Kristofferson. His father, a major general in the Air Force, strongly urged him to pursue a military career.
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.
He graduated with honors with a degree in literature from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., in 1958. He also had prizewinning entries in a collegiate short-story contest sponsored by The Atlantic magazine before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford.
Instead, under the pseudonym Kris Carson, he made a fruitless bid to become a pop star while there, working with Tony Hatch, the British impresario known for his success with the singer Petula Clark.
He graduated a second time 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.
If his wife was crestfallen by the move, his parents were scandalized. For a while they disowned him for throwing away everything he had worked so hard to achieve.
His 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.
“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 Kristofferson a Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year in 1972.
Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, who were married for much of the ’70s, won Grammy Awards for best country vocal performance by a duo or group with “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 Mr. Kristofferson played the outlaw Billy the Kid. Peckinpah cast Kristofferson in the film after seeing him perform at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and in “Cisco Pike” (1972), his big-screen debut.
Martin Scorsese then cast Mr. 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 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born,” a performance for which he won a Golden Globe Award.
Over four decades Mr. 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 onscreen a magnetism and command that made him an exception to the rule. In 2006 he was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, along with Matthew McConaughey, Cybill Shepherd and JoBeth Williams.
* By the justneverforget team, from tributes by The New York Times and others.
