Country music legend Kris Kristofferson, songwriter and actor, dies at 88
Kris Kristofferson, one of the most influential American singer-songwriters of his time and a successful actor, died on Saturday at the age of 88 at his home in Maui, Hawaii, his family announced on Sunday. Kristofferson retired from performing during the pandemic, when the memory loss he was diagnosed with at age 70 permanently deprived him of contact with the world.
A versatile man by the standards of the American art scene, he had been an athlete, an army officer and a helicopter pilot, as well as a Rhodes scholar and a janitor, before developing a brilliant career in show business without selling himself to brands or fashions. As his official website says, his life was unprecedented and will never be replicated.
Kristofferson began his career as a singer in Nashville, the capital of country music , where he became known for his thunderous baritone voice, a still unpolished stream. His first hit, Help Me Make it Through the Night , earned him a Grammy, as well as serving as the soundtrack to Fat City . Classic titles of the genre followed, such as For the Good Times and the melancholic Me and Bobby McGee , composed for Janis Joplin, with whom he maintained a close relationship. It is said that when he heard the singer in the recording studio, the author of the song, which she also performed, burst into tears. In 1992, when the Irish Sinéad O’Connor was booed at a tribute to Bob Dylan, he was the only one to support her on stage and later wrote a song in her honor, Sister Sinéad .
Kristofferson, who could recite the poet William Blake by heart, wrote folk music lyrics about loneliness and love in all its forms, especially the hopeless ones. With his flowing hair, bell-bottoms and a style indebted to Bob Dylan, Kristofferson represented a new generation of country songwriters , strongly influenced by the counterculture of the time, along with other names such as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.
“There’s no greater songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said at an awards ceremony for Kristofferson in November 2009. “Everything he writes is a classic, and we’re all going to have to live with that,” his colleague and friend described him, as quoted by the Associated Press. Nelson and Kristofferson would join forces with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to create the country supergroup The Highwaymen beginning in the mid-1980s.
Kristofferson retired from the stage in 2021, making only occasional guest appearances onstage, including a performance with Roseanne Cash at Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. The two sang a song Kristofferson wrote and of which Nelson — one of the great interpreters of her work as well as a friend — recorded her best-known version.
In the cinema, he stood out as the antagonist of Barbra Streissand in A Star Is Born , one of the highest-grossing films of 1976. He also starred in Martin Scorsese’s film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) opposite Ellen Burstyn and shared the bill with Wesley Snipes in Blade , a Marvel production from 1998.
Born in Brownsville, Texas, on June 22, 1936, Kristofferson spent a nomadic childhood because of his father’s work, an Air Force general. After excelling in school boxing and football leagues, Kristofferson studied English Literature at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, but put academic life on hold to follow family tradition and join the army. He went through the elite Rangers school, learned to fly helicopters and rose to the rank of major. In 1965 he was offered a position as an English teacher at the West Point Military Academy in New York, but he turned it down to take up the guitar in Nashville.
Far from uniforms and stripes, Kristofferson preferred to work as a janitor in 1966 at the Columbia Records studio for the opportunity that this gave him to offer his songs to the label’s big stars, such as Dylan himself. But he also worked as a helicopter pilot transporting workers between the oil fields of Louisiana. During that time he composed some of his most memorable songs, such as Help Me Make It Through the Night , on an oil rig.
Sometimes his legend outgrew his real-life achievements. Cash liked to tell a story, much of it exaggerated, of how Kristofferson, a former military pilot, landed in a helicopter on his lawn to deliver a tape of Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down with a beer in his hand. Over the years, in various interviews, Kristofferson stated, with all due respect to Cash, that although he landed a helicopter at his house, the Man in Black wasn’t even home at the time, that the demo was a song no one ever recorded, and that he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter with a beer in his hand.
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