According to a spokesman for the family, Kris Kristofferson passed away at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, September 28, 2024. The Brownsville, Texas native was the author of such revered songs as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times,” and “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kristofferson’s rise to fame was anything but a direct one. Before reaching the age of 30, his list of accomplishments was already as impressive as it was varied: a golden glove boxer, a star rugby and football player in college, a Rhodes Scholar and recipient of a Master’s Degree in English from Merton College, Oxford (he could quote English poets such as William Blake from memory), and a US Army helicopter pilot. But in 1965, he turned down an offer to teach English Literature at West Point in order to pursue a songwriting career. The following year found him nearly destitute, working as a lowly janitor for Columbia Records at the company’s Music Row studio (the same year in which Bob Dylan recorded his groundbreaking album “Blonde on Blonde” there.)
"There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson. Everything he writes is a standard, and we’re all just going to have to live with that."
But Kristofferson’s persistence – exemplified by a subsequently much embellished and exaggerated attempt to personally deliver a demo tape to Johnny Cash by landing a helicopter on the legend’s lawn unannounced – eventually led to a breakthrough at a time when the country music industry was turning its attention towards a new breed of rough-around-the-edges, countercultural singer-songwriters, among whom he naturally fit right in.
Before long, he had garnered the respect of many other bonafide legends in the field. Willie Nelson said of him in 2009: “There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson. Everything he writes is a standard, and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
In the 1980s Kristofferson joined Nelson and fellow “Outlaw Country” superstars Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings in forming the country music supergroup The Highwaymen.
Kristofferson also enjoyed success as an actor, starring alongside Ellen Burstyn in director Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” (1974) and with Barbra Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” (1976).
Kris Kristofferson retired from performing and recording in 2021, and had made only occasional public appearances since.
(Special RFD-TV connection: as Kristofferson explains in this video from the 1980s, he wrote “Sunday Morning Coming Down” while living in some apartments in Nashville’s Music Row area during the late 1960s, and according to local anecdotes, the neighborhood park which is the scene of one of the song’s verses was located on the lot now occupied by the parking garage adjacent to the building which houses our broadcast studio and offices!)
