Just this morning, before I’d heard the news, I’d listened to one of my (many) favorite songs of his, The Silver Tongued Devil and I.
And,
A Star is Gone.
I got to see him live, at some point in the '90s, when he toured with the rest of the Highwaymen. I was never a big fan of his singing voice, but he was an amazing songwriter, and a true Renaissance man.
Let me suggest Payback, Lone Star and Chelsea Walls if you haven’t seen them.
No, Convoy was great fun, for a movie based on a novelty song. A good drive-in B-picture, which is where I saw it.
He was also great in Dreamer.
Sad to hear of his passing. His life truly was a tapestry (thanks, Carole King), and he made the most of it at every opportunity.
Nobody but me seems to remember him in Amerikkka.
I bet the poor guy is having a rough night.
Great story about a very conservative country star (Toby Keith, here obfuscated) giving Kristofferson shit about the politics in his music, and Kristofferson having absolutely none of it.
The man was a real one, for sure.
I saw video of Cash and Kris doing Sunday Morning together. Cash talks about it being his favorite song and Kris was so happy he looked like he was going to cry.
At work, I am a leader in our Military and Allies Resource Council on the Communications team and I wrote about Kristofferson in the last newsletter. I admit that I kind of ran out of steam by the time I got to 1992 and with the deadline approaching, I chose to end it about him comforting Sinéad O’Connor.
MrsFtG is a big fan. Her favorite song of his is Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down. For me it’s Me and Bobby McGee.
The New Riders of the Purple Sage have a song Lonesome L.A. Cowboy with the line: “Kris and Rita, and Martin Mull are meeting at the troubadour.” Hope Rita Coolidge is doing okay.
Yeah, this one hits hard. I grew up listening to my parent’s copies of Me and Bobby McGee, The Silver-Tongued Devil, and Songs of Kristofferson. In my opinion, the only American songwriter who can match him as a poet and lyricist in the last seventy years is Ani DiFranco. He was a self-proclaimed country singer – in the spoken-word introduction to his version of Me and Bobby McGee, he says “If it sounds country, man, that’s what it is; this is a country song” - but his writing really transcended genres. Or perhaps it’s better to say, he wrote country songs about non-country situations and characters. One of my favorite songs is the lesser-known “Casey’s Last Ride”, a meditation on loneliness from the point of view of a Londoner, one of Eliot’s Englishmen who “live lives of quiet desperation”, remembering a tryst with an ex-lover. “Darby’s Castle” is another genre-crosser, a folk-style song about a man who builds a house for his beloved wife, and grows so obsessed that he ignores her and loses her love: “Though they shared a common bed,/ there was precious little said/in the moments that were set aside for sleeping./For his busy dreams were filled/with the room’s he’d yet to build/and he never heard young Helen Darby weeping.”
But then, Kris was also capable of writing a purely country line like “I’ve got a mind to see the headlights shining on that old white line/between my heart and home” or “That silver-tongued devil/just slipped from the shadows/and smilingly stole her away”.
Man. Georgia lost, the Browns lost, and Kris Kristofferson died. What a shitty weekend.
Pretty crappy miniseries, it wasn’t really his fault.
I was going to say I started a thread about it a “little while ago”, but it was actually in 2016!
Stood up for Sinead after the Pope picture thing. Took guts.