Kris Kristofferson loved stories. He treasured them, revered them, studied them, reinvented old ones, and created new ones. A hugely gifted intellectual who served as a military officer and enjoyed nothing more than reading novels and writing songs, he saw and understood the narratives that stoked the fires of human hearts, from the Oxford halls to Skid Row. Kristofferson took these loves and used them to give birth to new horizons in songwriting and new revelations on the silver screen. Of all his contributions to art, his music will endure the most in perpetuity.
By the mid-1960s, the trajectory of his life and career seemed all but secured. He had risen to the rank of captain with a spotless record, earned a steady reputation and support from his parents, and taken a promising assignment to teach literature at West Point. But time after time, all that he could hear beckoning to him was music. Most especially, he harkened to the stories told by Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash.
At the time, country music, though making great strides in the wider culture, still suffered under the opprobrium of stigma. For decades, country singers had labored under the label “hillbilly,” which denoted music made by unsophisticated, backward, and downright stupid people. High society considered the world of fiddles, banjos, steel guitars, and mandolins to be beneath their more lofty sensibilities. Songs about the affairs of plain living seemed too simple for the grandiose regions of emotion touched by other vogue, materialist genres. Such was the attitude of the Kristofferson family toward that sound and its disciples.
There is country music before Kris Kristofferson and country music after Kris Kristofferson.
But Kris, a Rhodes scholar who adored the great classics of Western fiction, could not help but fall in love with this distinctly American music. He realized how that culture mined the dimensions of the human condition with a simplicity, tenderness, and universality that no other category seemed to match, and he pined to write songs of his own that achieved the same feat. Recounting his first days in Nashville, he said, “I wrote seven, maybe 11 songs that first week. I thought if I didn’t make it as a songwriter I would at least get material to be the Great American Novelist. The people and places I was seeing were more exciting than anything I’d ever come across.” Having renounced his former life, his family subsequently disowned him, though all records seem to indicate that they reconciled later on. Once settled in Music City, he set to work deepening the wellspring of the country spirit, aided by his natural talent and penchant for simple wisdom. His tireless pen resulted in “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and several other tremendous songs, all of them covered by legends: Roger Miller, Janis Joplin, Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson, to name but a few.
The enduring touchstone of his contributions was a new understanding of country music that pierces through the baggage of stereotypes and long-settled historical conflicts to a quiet and wide-eyed musical solidarity. He took the material of the everyday world, eighteen-wheelers, city sidewalks, helpless heartache, strung-out loneliness, and “the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken,” yielding new epiphanies in passion and contemplation for every willing ear. In his work lies what Pope Pius XII characterized as “the law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to. This law is sealed by the sacrifice of redemption offered by Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father, on behalf of sinful humanity” (Summi Pontificatus 35, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church 1939). Kristofferson manifested this understanding through his tender, intimate, and direct approach to the characters and relationships in his songs. “Maybe Lord,” he prays in his only number one hit “Why Me,” “I could show someone else / What I’ve been through myself on my way back to you.” In such wise, one can say confidently that there is country music before Kris Kristofferson and country music after Kris Kristofferson.
His best-remembered line sounds like an outdated anthem but in fact strikes at the substance of happiness: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Freedom is the capacity to choose the good, to do as one ought; this demands losing every impediment, every desire, every vice that prohibits or limits that right. When all of that has been overcome and the path to the good life has been made straight, there is truly nothing left to lose; only goodness and kindness follow (Ps. 23:6).
Musical beauty at its finest arrests the soul to such a degree that nothing but Truth is left in its wake. Kris Kristofferson answered the call to make beauty of that stature, and for that, he deserves untold gratitude.