“I Do Not Consider Myself Very Scholarly”: Remembering Kris Kristofferson

“Why me, Lord?” Kris Kristofferson asked in a 1972 gospel song. “What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I’ve known?”

Since the songwriter’s death in September at 88, the obituaries have given us a roll call of his character and craft: the rugged individualism, the weary generosity, the graceful masculinity. But the feeling behind his prayer is easily overlooked, even though it planted him squarely in the poetic canon. It steered his ballads of loss and hard luck out from the orbit of self-pity. The feeling I’m talking about is bliss.

“Why me?” is a question we ask of pain. “Why,” Job asked God, “hast thou set me as a mark against thee?” This is the plea of the blues. In country music, Hank Williams set the bar in 1949 with his depression waltz “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Singers have tried to jump it ever since, with George Jones in the lead.

Kristofferson did it differently. He posed the question “why me?” not in misery but in gratitude. One example is the sublime “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” from his second LP The Silver Tongued Devil and I (1971). The song is an extended metaphor comparing a lover’s affection to sunlight upon the rotating earth. It begins:

I have seen the morning burning golden on the mountain in the skies,
Aching with the feeling of the freedom of an eagle when she flies,
Turning on the world the way she smiled upon my soul as I lay dying,
Healing as the colors in the sunshine and the shadows of her eyes . . .

This mounting run-on scenery, the saturation in joy, the melodic walkup to the refrain—it’s almost enough to distract us from the song’s problem: the past tense. “Loving her was easier,” goes the chorus. She’s gone, but we’re never even told she left.

This sense of lingering forfeiture suffuses Kristofferson’s best songs—among them “Me and Bobby McGee,” “When I Loved Her,” “For the Good Times,” and “Nobody Wins”—but always with a restraint that upholds the integrity of the joys being lost. He lamented with dignity.

There are spiritual reasons for this. One way to brave loss is through a higher power, and Christian imagery certainly runs through this songbook. Notably in “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” in which a hippie vagabond is described in terms of prophecy and denigration that sound awfully like Christ (said to have died at 33) or John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress:

He’s a poet, and he’s a picker
He’s a prophet, and he’s a pusher
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned
He's a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
There’s a lotta wrong directions on that lonely way back home.

Rather than pulpit Christianity, Kristofferson espoused a personal, hedonistic kind of spirituality, in which gain and loss are necessary halves of one order. It’s the kind of world the Romantic poets saw vividly, especially William Blake, who sought “a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” and who insisted, scandalously, “Thou art a Man: God is no more: / Thy own Humanity learn to adore.”

Blake was Kristofferson’s favorite at the University of Oxford, where the young Texan read English. He was a Rhodes Scholar, even though he admitted in his application “I do not consider myself very scholarly, and I do not think I would like a life of undiluted study.” He left before his third year, in 1960, to fly helicopters for the US military. When West Point offered him a job teaching English literature, he about-faced yet again. He turned it down to become a songwriter in Nashville, for which his parents disowned him.

The debt to Blake—a poet who told stories in the old ballad tradition—shows in Kristofferson’s anti-blues tales such as “Darby’s Castle” and “Casey’s Last Ride,” shanties that would feel right at home on a poop deck. And even more so in the emotional yin-yang of “Little Girl Lost,” from his early goldmine Border Lord (1972). In that song, a cruel woman has burned the narrator and broken his heart. We learn of her dishonesty in dark and winding verses:

If you want more than sympathy then look for something else,
Cause she’s not true to anyone, not even to herself.

Between the verses Kristofferson slides childlike little bridges that take back all the mean things he said. Happy major chords on glockenspiel accompany his request:

But if you take her,
Take her easy.
Treat her gentle.
She used to love me.

It’s a seesaw of resentment and devotion, and Kristofferson’s source was Blake’s own “The Little Girl Lost,” a poem from the 1794 volume Songs of Innocence and of Experience. With its companion “The Little Girl Found,” Blake’s diptych makes an allegory of chaos and completion in the form of a runaway child fable. At the end, when the parents finally find their daughter safe in the wilderness, Blake can hardly pry the relief from all the beastly fear:

Then they followèd
Where the vision led,
And saw their sleeping child
Among tigers wild.

To this day they dwell
In a lonely dell,
Nor fear the wolvish howl
Nor the lion’s growl.

Unlike the pure surrender in Bob Dylan’s take on Blake, “Every Grain of Sand,” from 1981, Kristofferson preferred the knife’s edge between feelings. His colleague in literary country songs, John Prine, observed the world’s evils and made them light. (His manifesto was the song “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow),” a lesson in the weathering of pain.) Kristofferson specialized in the joys but he made them hard. (See “I May Smoke Too Much,” a paean to overindulgence.)

Kristofferson’s most famous string of images occurs in “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” from his 1970 debut, in which the narrator wakes alone and quietly observes his neighborhood: children playing in a park, kitchen smells in the air, church bells in the distance. Then comes a sharp, unnamed pang of “something that I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way”—and the song hits a volta.

William Wordsworth, writing in “Tintern Abbey” during a bout of nostalgia for his childhood, explains the disruptive power of such longing, and how to bounce back from it:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence . . . 

Or as Blake put it, with that imagery of flight and light that fired Kristofferson at Oxford:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise

These lyric poets understand the truest thing about pleasure: it leaves—but might return someday. C. S. Lewis called it “the law of Undulation.” Through his strangely stoic epicureanism, Kristofferson conjured the sense of freedom for which his songs are most celebrated. I wonder if that relationship to joy—developed before he ever entered a recording studio—was what let him endure his parents’ rejection, perhaps the animating loss for this bard of delight. Now that he’s gone, maybe we can admit that that loss became our gain.