Obituary: Songwriting, singing and acting icon dies at 88 – Salisbury Post

By ANDREW DALTON and KRISTIN M. HALL AP Entertainment Writers

LOS ANGELES — Kris Kristofferson, the Rhodes Scholar with a deft writing style and gruff charisma who became a country music superstar and a leading Hollywood actor, has died.

Kristofferson died Saturday at his home in Maui, Hawaii, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88 years old.

McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No reason given.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such country and rock and roll standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee. Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known when performed by others, whether Ray Price was crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin was screaming “Me and Bobby McGee.”

He starred alongside Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film “Alice Lives Here Anymore,” starred alongside Barbra Streisand in 1976’s “A Star Is Born” and starred alongside Wesley Snipes in Marvel’s “Blade” in 1998.

Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake by heart, wove intricate folk lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottom pants and Bob Dylan-inspired counterculture songs, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with peers such as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.

“There is no better songwriter in the world than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said at Kristofferson’s 2009 BMI award ceremony. “Everything he writes is standard and we will all have to live with it.”

Kristofferson retired from performing and recording in 2021, making only occasional guest appearances on stage, including an appearance with Cash’s daughter, Rosanne, at Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. The two sang “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Everything I’ll Ever Do Again)” – a song that was a hit for Kristofferson and a long-time fixture in live performances by Nelson, another great interpreter of his work.

Nelson and Kristofferson joined forces with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to form the country supergroup “The Highwaymen” in the mid-1980s.

Kristofferson was a boxer, rugby star and Golden Gloves player in college; received an MA in English from Merton College, University of Oxford, England; and flew helicopters as a U.S. Army captain, but turned down an offer to teach at the United States 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 while Dylan was recording songs for the groundbreaking double album “Blonde on Blonde.”

Sometimes the legend of Kristofferson was bigger than real life. Cash liked to tell the mostly exaggerated story of how Kristofferson landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him the “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” tape, beer in hand. Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson, with all due respect to Cash, has said that although he landed the helicopter at Cash’s house, Man in Black wasn’t even home at the time, there was a song on the demo tape that no one had actually cut and recorded. he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter with beer.

In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, he said he wouldn’t have a career without Cash.

“Shaking his hand while I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I decided I was going to come back,” Kristofferson said. “It was electric. He kind of took me under his wing before he cut any of my songs. He recorded my first album, which became the album of the year. It was the first time he put me on stage.”

One of his most recorded songs, “Me and Bobby McGee”, was written on the recommendation of Monument Records founder Fred Foster. Foster had a song title in mind called “Me and Bobby McKee,” named after the secretary in his building. Kristofferson said in an interview with Performing Songwriter magazine that he was inspired to write the lyrics about a man and a woman on the road after watching Frederico Fellini’s film “La Strada.”

Joplin, who was close to Kristofferson, changed the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and cut her version just days before her death in 1970 from a drug overdose. The recording became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Joplin.

Kristofferson’s hits include “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I’d Like to Sing” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”

In 1973, he married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge, and together they had a successful duo career that earned them two Grammy Awards. They divorced in 1980.

The formation of the Highwaymen with Nelson, Cash and Jennings was another key point in his career as a performer.

“I think what I was different from the other guys was that I came into it as a fan of all of them,” Kristofferson told the AP in 2005. “I respected them when I was still in the army. When I went to Nashville, they were like my main heroes because they were people who took music seriously. To not only be recorded by them, but also become friends with them and work side by side was just a bit unreal. It was like seeing your face on Mount Rushmore.

Between 1985 and 1995, the group released only three albums. Jennings died in 2002 and Cash a year later. Kristofferson said in 2005 that there was talk of reforming the group with other artists such as George Jones or Hank Williams Jr., but Kristofferson said it wouldn’t be the same.

“When I look back now, I know I heard Willie say it was the best time of his life,” Kristofferson said in 2005. “I wish I was more aware of how short this time will be. A few years had passed, but it was still like the blink of an eye. I wish I could enjoy every moment.”

Of the four, only Nelson is currently alive.

Kristofferson’s sharp, political lyrics sometimes hurt his popularity, especially in the late 1980s. His 1989 album “Third World Warrior” focused on Central America and what U.S. policy brought there, but critics and fans were not thrilled with the overtly political songs.

In a 1995 interview with the AP, he said he remembered a woman complaining about one of the songs that began with killing children in the name of freedom.

“And I said, ‘Well, what pissed you off – the fact that I was saying it or the fact that we were doing it?’ For me, they were mad at me because I was telling them what was going on.

The son of an Air Force general, he enlisted in the Army in the 1960s because it was expected of him.

“I attended ROTC in college, and it was obvious in my family that I would give my service,” he said in a 2006 interview with the AP. “From my background and the generation in which I was raised, honor and serving one’s country were simply taken for granted. So when you later question some of the things that are done in your name, it was especially painful.”

Hollywood could have saved his music career. He continued to gain notoriety through appearances in films and television, even when he could not afford to tour with a full band.

Kristofferson’s first role was in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Picture” in 1971.

He liked Westerns and played attractive, stoic leads with his husky voice. He was Burstyn’s impossibly handsome love interest in “Alice Lives Here Anymore” and the tragic rock star in a tempestuous relationship with Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” played by Bradley Cooper in the 2018 remake.

He was the young titular outlaw in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” from 1973 directed by Sam Peckinpah, a truck driver by the same director in “Convoy” from 1978 and a corrupt sheriff in “Lone Star” by John Sayles from 1996. He played also in one of Hollywood’s biggest financial flops, “Heaven’s Gate,” a 1980 Western that went over budget by tens of millions of dollars.

In a rare appearance in a superhero film, he played the mentor to vampire hunter Snipes in “Blade.”

In a 2006 interview with the AP, he described how he landed his first acting gigs while performing in Los Angeles.

“It just so happened that my first professional gig was at the Troubadour in Los Angeles opening for Linda Rondstadt,” Kristofferson said. “Robert Hilburn (Los Angeles Times music critic) wrote a fantastic review and the concert was postponed for a week,” Kristofferson said. “There were a lot of filmmakers coming there and I started getting film offers with no experience. Of course, I had no experience in performing either.”

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Hall reported from Nashville. AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Rosanne Cash.