Kris Kristofferson, country singer, songwriter and actor, dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions deeply inspired country music rarely heard and who later had a successful second career in film, died Saturday at his home in Maui, Hawaii. He was 88.

His death was announced by AB McFarland, a spokesman, who did not give a cause.

Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson's songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Mr. Kristofferson's breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet song that topped the country charts and reached the Top 40 on Ray Price's pop chart in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a no. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.

Mr. Cash memorably delivered the song's irresistible opening couplet:

Well, I woke up on Sunday morning

There was no way I could hold my head that didn't hurt

And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad

So I had one more for dessert.

Expressing more than just the discomfort of a hangover sufferer, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to a sense of spiritual abandonment that borders on the absolute. The chorus describes the loneliness that the protagonist of the song “Nothing Less than Death” is feeling.

Steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility as indebted to John Keats as the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson's work explored themes of freedom and commitment, isolation and longing, darkness and light.

“Freedom is another word left to lose/Nothing worth but it's free,” he wrote on “Me and Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin, with whom Mr. Kristofferson was briefly romantically involved, had a posthumous No. 1 single in 1971 with a plaintive recording of her song.

Later that year “Help Me Make It Through the Night” became a No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hit featuring a heartbreaking performance by Sammi Smith. The composition won Mr. Kristofferson a 1972 Grammy Award for Country Song.

It was an exciting time to be a songwriter in Nashville, where Mr. Kristofferson fell in with a gifted circle of like-minded — and similarly bacchanalian — songwriters who were as driven to succeed as he was, among them Roger Miller and Willie Nelson.

“We took it seriously enough that our work was important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture,” Mr. Christopherson said in a 2006 interview with the journal No Depression.

“Looking back on it, I think it was like our Paris in the '20s,” he said, alluding to American expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who lived there at the time. “Real creative and real exciting – and intense.”

Mr. Kristofferson's own raspy, sometimes pitch-indifferent vocals never quite caught on with commercial radio. A notable exception was the gospel-infused “Why Me”, a No. 1 country and Top 40 pop hit released on the Monument label in 1973. (Another of his gospel songs, “One Day at a Time,” written with Marizon Wilkin, was a No. 1 country single for singer Christy Lane in 1980.)

Mr. Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, who were married for much of the '70s, won Grammy Awards for best country vocal performance by a duo or group with “From the Bottle to the Bottom” (1973) and “Lover Please” (1975). . . They appeared together in movies, including Sam Peckinpah's 1973 western, ''Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,'' in which Mr. Kristofferson played the criminal Billy the Kid. Peckinpah cast Mr. Kristofferson in films after seeing him perform at the Los Angeles Troubadour and his big screen debut in “Cisco Pike” (1972).

Martin Scorsese then cast Mr. Kristofferson, whose rugged good looks made themselves known on the big screen, alongside Ellen Burstyn, in the critically acclaimed 1974 drama “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.” She later starred opposite Barbra Streisand in Frank Pearson's 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, for which she won a Golden Globe Award.

Over four decades Mr. Kristofferson starred in more than 50 movies, including the 1980 box-office failure “Heaven's Gate” and John Seles' Oscar-nominated 1996 neo-western “Lone Star.” Singer-songwriters may not be the most promising of movie stars, but Mr. Kristofferson consistently exudes a magnetism and command onscreen that makes him the exception to the rule. In 2006 he was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame along with Matthew McConaughey, Cybill Shepherd and Jobeth Williams.

Mr. Kristofferson's last big hit as a recording artist was “The Highwaymen,” a No. 1 country single in 1985 by the Highwaymen, an exotic-country supergroup that included his longtime friends Waylon Jennings, Mr. Nelson and Mr. Cash.

Mr. Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, played an important role in Mr. Kristofferson's budding career when they invited him to appear with them at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969.

Mr. Kristofferson was still a songwriter after working as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville, where he later recalled emptying ashtrays and waste paper baskets during the 1966 sessions for Mr. Dylan's “Blonde on Blonde.” Unsettled by stage fright that night in Newport, Mr. Christopherson might have lost his chance had it not been for the encouragement of Mr. Carter Cash, who her husband recalled in an interview, but everyone pulled him onto the stage with them.

The evening proved opportune after receiving a highly favorable mention in The New York Times the next day, exposing Mr. Christopherson to a national audience.

“If there was one thing that started my performing career, it was right there,” Mr. Christopherson said, reflecting on the experience in the 2013 book “Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Chris and the Renegades of Nashville.” ” by Michael Streseguth.

Christopher Christopherson was born on June 22, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas, the eldest of three children born to Mary Ann (Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Christopherson. His father, a major general in the Air Force, strongly urged him to pursue a military career.

The family later moved west, and in 1954 Mr. Christopherson graduated from San Mateo High School in Northern California, where he distinguished himself in both academics and athletics. He was later featured in Sports Illustrated's “Faces in the Crowd” series in 1958 as an up-and-coming boxer.

Mr. Christopherson graduated with honors from Pomona College in Claremont, California in 1958 with a degree in literature. He also had a prize-winning entry in a collegiate short-story contest sponsored by The Atlantic magazine before receiving a Rhodes Scholarship to study English literature. At Oxford

Under the pseudonym Chris Carson, he made an unsuccessful bid to become a pop star while there, working with British influencer Tony Hatch, known for his success with singer Petula Clark.

Mr. Christopherson graduated from Merton College, Oxford, in 1960 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army. In 1961 he married Frances Beer and settled in Germany, where he worked as a helicopter pilot.

He was promoted to captain in 1965 and received an appointment to teach English at West Point. He ultimately turned down the position, trading the comforts it could afford for the hunger of life as a songwriter in Nashville.

If his wife was disappointed in the move, his parents were scandalized. For a while they rejected him for throwing away everything he had worked so hard to achieve.

For a 1970 feature in Times magazine, Mr. Christopherson said, “I knew I didn't bail on a lot of cats.” “When I took a break I didn't realize how much I was shocking people, because I always thought they knew I was going to be a writer. But I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweed with a pipe. And I gave up and didn't hear from them for a while.

“I don't want to go through that again,” he continued, “but it's part of who I am.”

Success in Nashville initially eluded Mr. Christopherson, and not without reason. According to Ms. Wilkin, the first publisher who signed her to a songwriting contract, she had to learn — and unlearn — things before she arrived at the distinctive blend of vernacular and sophisticated idiom that became her stock in trade.

“He was a poet and an English teacher, so his songs were very long and very perfect,” Ms. Wilkin said in a 2003 interview with Nashville Scene. “His grammar was so perfect. He had to learn how to talk to people.”

Mr. Kristofferson's transformation as a songwriter involved more than sprinkling phrases like “no” and “nothing” into his songs. He also developed a sharp melodic sensibility, a steady expression that bears little resemblance to the straight Hank Williams-derived shuffles he produced when he first arrived in Nashville.

“I am was To get better,” Mr. Kristofferson said in an interview with Nashville Scene, reflecting on the lean years before he broke through as a songwriter. “I was spending every second I could hanging out and writing and bouncing off other writers' heads.”

He also changed publishers, leaving Miss Wilkin's Buckhorn Music for Combine Music, owned by producer Fred Foster, who also had the freewheeling likes of Shel Silverstein and Mickey Newbury under contract.

In 1970 Mr. Foster issued his independent label Monument, “Christofferson”, Mr. Christopherson's debut as a recording artist. The album included versions of several songs that became hits for other artists, including “Me and Bobby McGee,” for which Mr. Foster was credited as a co-writer. (This song was originally recorded by Roger Miller, who had a top 20 country hit with it in 1969.)

Mr. Christopherson released other albums in the 70s to mixed reviews; By the end of the decade his career in films began to overtake his reputation as a singer-songwriter.

In the 80s and 90s his music took an activist turn, speaking of social justice and human rights. “What About Me,” a song from his 1986 album, “Repossessed,” spoke out against right-wing military aggression in Central America.

Bypass surgery in 1999 slowed Mr. Christopherson, as did an extended battle with Lyme disease over the next decade, but he remained active into his 80s.

Mr. Christopherson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. By then he had already been elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1977) and the National Academy of Popular Music's Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1985). He also received a lifetime achievement honor at the 2014 Grammy Awards.

Mr. Christopherson is survived by his wife of over 40 years, Lisa (Meyers) Christopherson; their sons, Jesse, Jody, Johnny and Blake; and a daughter, Kelly Marie; a son, Chris, and daughter, Tracy, from his marriage to Ms. Bear; and a daughter, Casey, from his marriage to Mrs. Coolidge; and seven grandchildren.

A man of extraordinary gifts and appetites, Mr. Kristofferson struggled early on with what path to follow among the many open to him. He admits as much in the song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33”, portraying a conflicted figure, much like himself, who took “every wrong turn on the lonely road home”.

Despite such self-deprecation, Mr. Christopherson believed that songwriting – certainly a “wrong side” in his family's eyes, at least at first – was the means by which he discovered his vocation in life and through which he achieved celebrity and artistic acclaim. .

“I wouldn't be doing any of this if it weren't for writing,” he said looking back on his career in a 2006 interview with the online magazine Country Standard Time.

“I couldn't have made the record if I hadn't written. I wouldn't have gotten through the tour without it. And if I wasn't known as a writer, I would never have been asked to act in films.”

“Writer” was the occupation listed on Mr Christopherson's passport.