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Kris Kristofferson’s 10 Best Songs
From 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' and 'Help Me Make It Through the Night' to 'Feeling Mortal,' Variety picks 10 Kris Kristofferson immortal classics.
And indeed he did: A Rhodes scholar who mortified his family by abandoning a promising career in the military to starve for five years before he made it as a songwriter, Kristofferson was a legendary hell-raiser who was every bit as badass as any of his contemporaries: He famously got Johnny Cash’s attention by landing a helicopter on his lawn. “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” (1971) — Despite the seeming Biblical reference in its title, as Kristofferson says in a spoken introduction, this song is actually about several of his friends (including Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash, Bobby Neuwirth, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rambling Jack Elliott). He was very much rocking the vein of the we-are-about-to-break-up-but-let’s-make-love-first songs in the early ’70s, and perhaps that’s why he didn’t cut it himself at the time, leaving it to first be recorded by Bobby Bare, before he put it on wax with then-wife Rita Coolidge on their third and final album of duets in 1978.
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