US country singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson is dead.
He was considered one of the most important songwriters and was also successful in Hollywood: American musician Kris Kristofferson died on Saturday. He was 88 years old.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The line from the song “Me And Bobby McGee” is one of the most famous sentences in rock and pop history. It became a proverbial saying and a motto for an entire generation. But it doesn’t come from Janis Joplin, who posthumously made the song a global hit in 1971, but from Kris Kristofferson, one of the most important songwriters of his time.
Kris Kristofferson was born in Brownsville Texas in 1936 as the son of an Air Force general. He studied at Oxford in the UK on a scholarship for highly gifted students. He was an army officer and stationed in Germany as a helicopter pilot. But in 1965 he quit his job as an English teacher at the cadet school at West Point and moved to Nashville, the mecca of country music, where he made himself useful as a girl for everything.
He was still employed as a cleaner on Bob Dylan’s epochal “Blonde On Blonde” (1966). Twenty years later, Dylan included the Kristofferson song “They Killed Him” on his album “Knocked Out Louded.” A rare award and honor that expresses the admiration that was entirely mutual.
The country singer who reached the pop and rock world
He used his work as a studio assistant in Nashville to give established stars one or two self-written songs. These songs soon caused a stir because they were songs with content that was rare in conservative Nashville at the time. Songs with lyrics full of poetry that breathed the times of upheaval. Songs that also appealed to young people.
It was established stars like Johnny Cash who made Kristofferson famous and also paved his way as a solo artist. With his way of writing songs, he contributed a lot to upgrading the genre, which had become sluggish, in the early 1970s. The singer with the baritone that took some getting used to managed the feat of appealing to a pop and rock audience with his country songs. For Kristofferson, content and lyrical content were clearly the focus of his songs. They were so important that interpretation, arrangement and instrumentation sometimes seemed almost irrelevant.
He wrote one hit after another, including “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” He won three Grammys: for best country song and for two duets with Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973-80. He also became a celebrated film star. In Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 western “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” he played the role of the notorious outlaw alongside James Coburn. In 1977, he won a Golden Globe Award alongside Barbra Streisand for playing a dissolute rock star in “A Star is Born.”
Drinking, argumentative and addicted to sex
Kristofferson’s dissolute lifestyle would soon set him apart from Nashville. He was considered a hard drinker, argumentative and made headlines in the tabloid press with his countless affairs. The country singer lived a rock ‘n’ roll life and continually lived up to his dubious reputation. He slipped into alcohol addiction and also stagnated artistically.
He described this phase of his life in the album “Shake Hands With The Devil” (1979) as “a handshake with the devil”. It was only the formation “The Highwayman” with his friends Willie Nelson, Waylon Jannings and Johnny Cash that gave him stability again in the mid-80s.
Kris Kristofferson was a conflicted personality. Behind the bearded façade of the daredevil hid a sensitive, melancholy, highly talented poet and artist. “It is a walking contradiction, part truth, part invention,” he wrote about himself in “The Pilgrim – Chapter 33,” “and a problem when it is full again.”
In 2004 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. CEO Kyle Young wrote: “Kris Kristofferson believed that creativity is God-given and that those who ignore this gift are doomed to unhappiness. He preached that a life of the Spirit gives voice to the soul, and his work gave voice not only to his soul, but to ours as well. He leaves a resounding legacy.”
Kris Kristofferson died peacefully at home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday at the age of 88, the family announced on behalf of his wife Lisa, his eight children Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake as well his seven grandchildren. There was initially no information about the cause of his death.
