Kris Kristofferson: Dreamer, Drifter, Writer
“He’s a poet and he’s a picker, he’s a prophet and he’s a pusher
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction
Takin’ every wrong direction on his lonely way back home”
Kris Kristofferson’s ‘The Pilgrim, Chapter 33’, released in 1971 on his album ‘The Silver Tongued Devil and I’ might have been intended to recognise his rambling, talented group of friends and fellow artists, namechecking those from Chris Gantry to Johnny Cash to Jerry Jeff Walker with some almost Biblical characteristics. But with Kristofferson’s passing after a lifetime of incomparable talent, he just might have self-written a memorial piece that more accurately depicts who he was than anyone else could come close to writing.
Arguably, Kristofferson brought a change to Nashville of thunderous proportion, country music of the 70s would have been entirely different without him, and the song-writing we have now likely would be too. The man himself had a life worthy of a very original and undoubtedly well-written country song: born in Texas, essays published in The Atlantic Monthly whilst still in college, an English Literature degree from Oxford University, a captain and helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, a down on his luck janitor, and a life-upending but obviously written in the stars move to Nashville.
As said by Guy Clark: “Hearing Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio and knowing it came out of Nashville made Nashville seem a lot more accessible to me.” Kristofferson was destined to be a writer as much as Johnny, Willie and Waylon were destined to carve out their legendary places in country too. In a 1970 interview, Kristofferson perfectly captured the unpredictable identity of being a writer: ‘I didn’t realize how much I was shocking [my] folks, because I always thought they knew I was going to be a writer. But I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweed with a pipe.’
As a writer, he absolutely used his poetic tendencies and artfully crafted prose that he’d developed from an education in the world of literature studies. But he couldn’t take an Oxford education to country radio with sudden success, he adapted and shaped his writing to tell the stories of real American people and everyday life. He didn’t change who he was to fit into Nashville, but rather he changed Nashville to fit who he was. He dug light out of the dark, and let the dark smother the light. He found yearning, love and loneliness. And he found the Silver Tongued Devil and asked the Lord ‘Why Me?’. He found the melancholia of ‘something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone’ and comfort in knowing there are ‘Lots of pretty thoughts that I ain’t thunk’.
Kristofferson possessed and perfected a song-writing skill that’s once in a blue moon, once in a generation or maybe even once in an eternity. His writing was relatable to an America that was seeing such deep social change, it was of its moment whilst becoming immediately classic. The honesty and natural flow in his writing was something different in Nashville, it wasn’t formulaic, it was poetry to music and he also knew who could record it in the way it was intended.
No-one else could record ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ like The Man in Black and Kristofferson knew that – going as far as to land a helicopter in Cash’s garden to get his attention. Thank God he did, that song could easily go down as one of the best of all time.
“From the rockin’ of the cradle
To the rollin’ of the hearse
The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down”
Kristofferson really was ‘a walkin contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction’. Partly a scholar, partly a veteran, partly a Highwayman, partly an activist, partly an actor, partly an artist – but entirely, fiercely, completely and immortally, a writer.
A dreamer and a drifter and a crafter of words: ‘Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end.’
