“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. Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt.”I am honestly not sure it’s possible to find a better lyric in country music than that. Pure poetry of the common man and explains exactly who this person is, who is about to take a walk on Sunday morning. My own Sunday morning did not start off on a happy note last week as I woke to the news of the passing of 88-year-old Kris Kristofferson, the silver-tongued devil and poet laureate of the Outlaw Country movement. Part of my sadness comes from the loss of such an influential artist I enjoy, but even more it’s a reminder of the ticking clock inside us and a sense of my own mortality. Kristofferson was one of the last two surviving founders of the Outlaw Country movement, arguably the greatest music genre of them all and my personal favorite.To understand Kristofferson and his music, you need to know a bit about his history. He was an army brat born in June of 1936 in the southernmost Texas city of Brownsville, but moved several times growing up as his father moved between bases. Some of his formative years helped influence his lyrics as he attended Claremont, California’s Pomona College, majoring in literature. Aspiring to become a writer, in college he was published in several magazines including Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic Monthly. He excelled in his education enough to earn a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he continued his training in literature.After graduation, Kristofferson’s pursuit of writing took a detour as he bowed to pressure from his family and joined the army in 1960. He became a helicopter pilot, reaching the rank of captain and spent much of his time stationed in Germany. While volunteering for Vietnam, the army instead posted him at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to teach literature—a very prestigious position. However instead Kristofferson took a different path.The 29-year-old left the army and moved to Nashville, taking a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios, angering his family, who cut off all ties with him. The Rhodes scholar, army captain and would-be literature professor was now sweeping floors for a ...
