Kristofferson is Gone: Me and Bobby McGee are Sure Gonna Miss Him

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Kris Kristofferson, who passed away yesterday at his home in Maui at the age of eighty-eight, was a complicated person.

Kristopher Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1936, the oldest of three children.  His father, who would later rise to the rank of Major General in the US Air Force, did his best to direct his oldest child into a military career.  Kris eventually did join the military, but that was after the Rhodes Scholar had graduated from Oxford University in England with a Masters degree in English literature.

Kris joined the army in 1960 where he graduated from Airborne School, Ranger School, and flight school.  He qualified as a helicopter pilot while serving with the US Army in Germany.  Young Captain Kristofferson wanted to take his skills as a helicopter pilot and put them to use in Vietnam, but the army instead assigned him to teach English literature at the US Military Academy at West Point.  Kristofferson, who was disappointed that he could not go to Vietnam, left the service and moved to Nashville where he took a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios - and where, in his spare time, he worked toward his serious goal of becoming a songwriter.

And the rest is history.  

Kristofferson achieved auspicious success not only in writing songs that became a permanent part of the American soundtrack - classics like "Me and Bobby McGee" which  became a Janis Joplin super hit, and "Sunday Morning Coming Down," a song in which Johnny Cash seemed to reveal his soul.  Some of the other many songs that Kristofferson penned include "Why Me," "For the Good Times,"  and "Help Me Make It Through the Night."   

The very talented Mr. Kristofferson was a recording artist and concert performer in his own right, and he as a member of the singing group,"The Highwaymen" along with country legends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.  Kris, too, was an accomplished film actor and starred with Barbra Streisand 1976 version of "A Star Is Born," (a movie that happened to be released on the day my daughter was born - yea Molly!)

Kris Kristofferson was also a social activist and a highly principled person.  He partnered with British actress Vanessa Redgrave in the late 1980's and early 1990's in speaking out about the plight of Palestinian children, and he gave concerts for their benefit.  His stance in support of the children of Palestine, according to Kristofferson, impacted his career negatively, but, he insisted "When you support human rights, you've got to support them everywhere."

I had the good fortune to see Kris Kristofferson in concert along with his wife at the time, Rita Coolidge,  in 1977 at the relatively new John Q. Hammonds Center in Springfield, an enormous venue both then and now.  (John Q. was very similar to Trump in that he had to have his name on almost everything he touched.). The place was packed to the rafters, I know that because I could almost touch the ceiling from where I sat in the farthest reaches of the nosebleed section, but, cheap-seating aside, it was a great show anyway.  At the end of the two-our performance, he and Coolidge (a legend in her own right) trotted out their three-year-old daughter, Casey, to smile and wave at the thousands of people who had gathered to watch her parents perform.

Today Casey is also an entertainer, as well as a mother of three.  Somehow she is fifty - something that certainly seems impossible to me!

Kris Kristofferson left behind his third wife, a lawyer named Lisa Meyers to whom he was married more than forty years,  eight grown children, and a host of grandchildren.

The amazing man, Kris Kristoffeerson, is gone, but his eighty-eight trips around the sun left humanity a better place than it would have been had he not been along for the ride.  He was an inspiring voice for human goodness and decency, and me and Bobby McGee and a whole bunch of others are sure gonna miss him!