Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday. He was 88.
His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.
Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs, from Al Green and the Grateful Dead to Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the pop Top 40 for Ray Price 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 intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:
Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to 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 malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the song’s chorus describes the desolation its protagonist is experiencing.
Steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose/Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free,” he wrote in “Me and Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin, with whom Mr. Kristofferson was briefly involved romantically, had a posthumous No. 1 single with her plaintive recording of the song in 1971.
Later that year “Help Me Make It Through the Night” became a No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hit in a heart-stopping performance by Sammi Smith. The composition won Mr. Kristofferson a Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year in 1972.
It was a heady time to be a songwriter in Nashville, where Mr. Kristofferson fell in with a gifted circle of like-minded — and similarly bacchanalian — tunesmiths who were as driven to succeed as he was, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson among them.
“We took it seriously enough to think that our work was important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture,” Mr. Kristofferson said in an interview with the magazine No Depression in 2006.
“Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the ’20s,” he went on, alluding to American expatriate writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who lived there at the time. “Real creative and real exciting — and intense.”
Mr. Kristofferson’s own raspy, at times pitch-indifferent vocals never quite gained traction with commercial radio. One notable exception was the gospel-suffused “Why Me,” a No. 1 country and Top 40 pop hit released on the Monument label in 1973. (Another gospel song of his, “One Day at a Time,” written with Marijohn Wilkin, was a No. 1 country single for the singer Christy Lane in 1980.)
Mr. Kristofferson is survived by his wife, Lisa; eight children: Tracy; Kris Jr.; Casey, Jesse; Jody; John; Kelly; and Blake; and seven grandchildren.
This is a breaking news story. A full obituary will appear soon.
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