THE SILVER TONGUED DEVIL & I

Kris Kristofferson was the embodiment of a Renaissance man. A Rhodes scholar turned military man turned Nashville country legend turned movie star, he steered the stormy waters of Music Row with an elegance that belied his rugged demeanour. With his own blend of literary lyricism, raw?passion, and social criticism, he elevated country music, often caricatured for its sentimentality, beyond its traditional boundaries, transforming it into a medium for storytelling and reflection, injecting a raw, unfiltered emotionality. His songs oozed angst and disregarded the sanitised in favour of the sacrilegious, exposing human frailty in a cruel yet beautiful manner. Themes of lonesomeness, unrequited love, and search for redemption were his mainstay, and he explored them with a candour that was uncommon at the time. His was not country music for the faint of heart; it was country music for the jaded soul-weary wanderer.

Much like the protagonist of The Pilgrim, Chapter, 33, Kristofferson, who died on September 28 at 88, was a “walking contradiction, /partly truth, and partly fiction.” Best known as a songwriter, he challenged conventional norms of the genre, contesting the belief that popular music and philosophical profundity are incompatible. Music City, USA wasn’t quite ready for him when he entered the scene. The staid and pious Nashville was still a tabernacle for the evangelist, with the likes of Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl making up a kind of old aristocracy. Country music had clung to the traditional theses of home, mother and country. And “Okie from Muskogee,” the most popular country song of 1970 by Merle Haggard, as the New York Times would note, was devoid of any mysticism like the rest. Kristofferson and his cohort of hippies that included Charlie Rich and Ray Stevens pushed the boundaries of this genre. When Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” won the coveted Country Music Association awards, it signalled a shift in the grammar of country music. As Bob Dylan would later assert, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.” His songs were, however, popularized more by other musicians like Johnny Cash—with whom he would later team up as a part of the Highwaymen—and Janis Joplin—whose posthumously released version of “Me and Bobby McGee” was later ranked as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. And while he was a popular musician, his recordings never sold astronomical numbers. Despite his initial success, Kristofferson’s solo musical career declined following the release of his non-charting ninth album, Shake Hands with the Devil. In the early 1970s, he would also embark on a failed foray into cinema with Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, and later acted in movies such as Lone Star and A Star Is Born.

I first came across Kristofferson through his song “Once More With Feeling” right around the time I had my first heart break. Sung by Jerry Lee Lewis, the tale of a man begging to rekindle a relationship that reached its breaking point was all too familiar. “Darling, make believe you’re making me/Believe each word you say,” says the desperate man. “To Beat the Devil,” from his debut album “Kristofferson,” would years later become a soothing lullaby, getting me across the cold, and warm the frozen feeling that was eating at my soul. “You see, the devil haunts a hungry man/If you don’t wanna join him, you gotta beat him,” he sings in his raspy, tired voice. Kristofferson’s masterpiece, however, without a doubt is “Me and Bobby McGee,” a road trip story on the surface, which underneath its fa?ade reveals a narrator deep in contemplation of liberation, loss, and the transient character of joy. Kristofferson’s version, though not as popular as the one by Janis, with its slow refrains and looping laments is bittersweet and superior as genre music. “I’d trade all of my tomorrows, for one single yesterday/To be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine,” he says—and we’ve all been there.

Kristofferson’s songwriting style fundamentally resembles that of a poet rather than that of a traditional composer. His songs are meticulously constructed, with each word selected with the accuracy of a literary craftsman. Take, for instance, the opening lines of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”: “Well I woke up Sunday morning, with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.” The economy of language, characterised by the capacity to express intricate emotions and scenarios succinctly, is a defining feature of his approach. Whatever the case, at the core of his soul was the profound realization of the ephemerality of youth and that the tragedy that endangers all love is the tragedy of the pursuit of happiness itself. Perhaps the narrator’s conclusion at the end of his journey with Bobby across the US in “Me and Bobby McGee” is right: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

?