Kris Kristofferson, one of the most influential American singer-songwriters of his time, as well as a successful actor, died on Saturday at the age of 88 at his home in Maui (Hawaii), his family announced this Sunday. Kristofferson retired from the stage during the pandemic, when the memory loss that had been diagnosed at the age of 70 definitively deprived him of contact with the world.
A versatile man by the standards of the American art scene, he had been an athlete, Army officer and helicopter pilot, as well as a Rhodes scholar and janitor, before developing a brilliant career in show business without selling out to brands or fashions. As his official website says, his life was unprecedented and will never have a possible replica.
Kristofferson started his career as a singer in Nashville, the music capital countrywhere he became known for his thunderous baritone voice, a still unpolished stream. His first success, Help Me Make it Through the Nightearned him a Grammy, in addition to serving as the soundtrack to Fat City. It was followed by classic titles of the genre, such as For the Good Times and the melancholic Me and Bobby McGeecomposed for Janis Joplin, with whom he had a close relationship. They say that when the author of the song, which he also performed, heard the singer in the recording room, he began to cry. In 1992, when the Irish Sinéad O’Connor was booed at a tribute to Bob Dylan, he was the only one who supported her on stage and later wrote a song in her honor, Sister Sinéad.
Kristofferson, who could recite the poet William Blake by heart, wrote folk music lyrics about loneliness and love in all its facets, especially the hopeless ones. With his hair flying in the wind, his bell-bottoms and a style indebted to Bob Dylan, Kristofferson represented a new generation of songwriters. countryvery marked by the counterculture of the time, along with other names such as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.
“There is no better living composer than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during an awards ceremony for Kristofferson in November 2009. “Everything he writes is a classic and we are all going to have to live with it,” his colleague defined him. and friend, in statements cited by the Associated Press agency. Nelson and Kristofferson would join their voices with those of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to create the supergroup country The Highwaymen starting in the mid-eighties.
Kristofferson retired from the stage in 2021, and made only occasional guest appearances on stage, including a performance with Roseanne Cash at Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. The two sang a song that Kristofferson wrote and of which Nelson—one of the great interpreters of his work, as well as a friend—recorded its best-known version.
In the cinema he stood out as the antagonist of Barbra Streissand in a star is bornone of the highest-grossing films of 1976. He also starred in Martin Scorsese’s film Alicia doesn’t live here anymore. (1974) opposite Ellen Burstyn and shared the bill with Wesley Snipes in Bladea Marvel factory production from 1998.
Born in Brownsville (Texas) on June 22, 1936, he spent a nomadic childhood due to the work of his father, an Air Force general. After standing out in the school boxing and soccer leagues, Kristofferson studied English Literature at the University of Oxford with a Rhodes Scholarship, but put academic life aside to fulfill family tradition and enlist in the army. He went through the elite Ranger school, learned to fly helicopters and rose to the rank of commander. In 1965 he was offered a position teaching English at the West Point Military Academy in New York, but he turned it down to embrace the guitar in Nashville.
Far from uniforms and stripes, Kristofferson preferred to work as a janitor in 1966 at the Columbia Records studio because of the opportunity that this meant to offer his songs to the label’s biggest stars, like Dylan himself. But he also worked as a helicopter pilot transporting workers between Louisiana oil fields. During that time he composed some of his most memorable songs, such as Help Me Make It Through the Nighton an oil platform.
Sometimes his legend surpassed his real-life achievements. Cash liked to tell a story, much of it exaggerated, about how Kristofferson, a former military pilot, landed by helicopter in his garden to deliver a tape of Sunday Mornin” Comin” Down with a beer in one hand. Over the years, in several interviews, Kristofferson stated, with all due respect to Cash, that although he landed with a helicopter at his house, the Man in Black He wasn’t even home at the time, that the demo was a song that no one ever recorded and that, of course, he couldn’t fly a helicopter with a beer in his hand.
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