In Memoriam: Kris Kristofferson (June 22, 1936 – September 28, 2024)

Silver-tongued devil Kris Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, September 28, at 88.

A consummate poet and storyteller, Kristofferson bequeathed the world with songs such as “For the Good Times,” a hit for Ray Price in 1970, and “Help Me Make It through the Night,” which Sammi Smith took to number one in 1971. In 1972, he won a Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year for it. Janis Joplin had a posthumous hit with his “Me and Bobby McGee” in 1971, and Johnny Cash had a #1 hit with Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” in 1970.

While other singers might have brought Kristofferson’s songs to a broader audience, they often lack the ragged despair, the hollow-eyed abandonment, the aching loneliness, or the mystical insights of Kristofferson’s own recordings of these and other songs. His hoarse, gritty vocals convey a down-to-the-bone quality as if he’s talking straight to us about his own feelings of spiritual loss or about an experience as simple as watching windshield wipers “slap time” on a sportscar. He was as fond of quoting William Blake and Hank Williams, and he used the best of both of them in his stories about lost pilgrims and their mystic hearts.

Born in Brownsville, Texas, on June 22, 1936, into a military family—his father, Lars, was a major general in the Air Force—Kristofferson moved frequently growing up. He attended high school in San Mateo, California, where he excelled in writing. At Pomona College, he wrote short stories that published in the Atlantic as part of collegiate contest the magazine sponsored. He attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, concentrating on English literature. After he graduated from Oxford in 1960, he joined the Army as a second lieutenant and became a helicopter pilot. In 1965, he turned down an appointment to teach English at West Point and traveled to Nashville in hopes of becoming a songwriter. For a while he swept floors and cleaned ashtrays at the Columbia Studios in Nashville, but he got his first big break when Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash asked him to appear with them at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969.

Kristofferson recorded several albums in the 1970s that included many of his most memorable songs such as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Why Me,” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn (Owed to John Prine).” He joined forces with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash to form the Highwaymen in 1985.

Kristofferson also starred in a number of films, including a remake of A Star is Born (1977), with Barbra Streisand, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and Lone Star (1996), among others.

A Renaissance man, Kristofferson was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977 and in the National Academy of Popular Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985. In 2004 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and he won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

Kris Kristofferson shared his pain and love with us through his songs, revealing his own struggles and lifting us out of our own. He will be missed.

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See below for some of our Kris Kristofferson favorites.

“Me and Bobby McGee”