By Andrew Dalton and Kristin M. Hall
Los Angeles: Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died.
Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.
McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given.
Kris Kristofferson performs at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, in 2010 in Tennessee.Credit: AP
Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such classics standards as Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, and Help Me Make it Through the Night. Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out Me and Bobby McGee.
Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.
“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
Nelson and Kristofferson would join forces with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to create the country supergroup The Highwaymen starting in the mid-1980s.
As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbra Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas.
Kristofferson retired from performing and recording in 2021, making only occasional guest appearances on stage after that.
Kristofferson was a Golden Gloves boxer, rugby star and football player in college; received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England; and flew helicopters as a captain in the US Army but turned down an appointment to teach at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal Blonde on Blonde double album.
At times, the legend of Kristofferson was larger than real life. Johnny Cash liked to tell a mostly exaggerated story of how Kristofferson landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him a tape of Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down with a beer in one hand.
Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson said with all respect to Cash, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the Man in Black wasn’t even home at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever actually cut and he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter holding a beer.
In 1973, he married songwriter Rita Coolidge. They shared a successful duet career that earned them two Grammy awards. They divorced in 1980.
AP
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