“Nashville,” Kris Kristofferson once said, “saved my life.”
He said it to Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2011, looking back on the gamble that made him a songwriting legend. Veterans Day is Wednesday, and his story starts in the U.S. Army.
Kris grew up in Brownsville, Texas. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined the Army in 1961, made it through Ranger School and trained as a helicopter pilot at Fort Rucker, Ala. He rose to captain and served in West Germany.
In 1965, the Army gave him a new job: teaching English literature at West Point. Kris turned it down. He left the Army and moved his family to Nashville to write songs.
“I probably would have ended up going to Vietnam, because I’d been in the Army,” he told Cowboys & Indians. “I was definitely not doing what I thought I was supposed to do.”
The songs didn’t pay at first. Kris took a janitor job at Columbia Records, the label Johnny Cash recorded for. “Yes, I was sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays. But I was emptying George Jones’ ashtrays,” he said.
He pitched Johnny every chance he got, handing over tapes or leaving them with people close to him. Johnny later claimed some of those tapes ended up in the lake behind his house.
To pay the bills, Kris went back to flying. He carried workers to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for a Louisiana company, a week offshore and a week in Nashville. “I’d be on a platform 50 miles out, writing songs when I wasn’t flying a helicopter,” he said. He also flew weekends for the Tennessee National Guard.
One day, on a Guard flight, Kris set the helicopter down on the lawn of Johnny’s home on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, Tenn.
Johnny told it his way. “I was taking a nap and June said, ‘Some fool has landed a helicopter in our yard,'” he recalled, as quoted by Guitar Player and Far Out. In his version, Kris climbed out “with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other.”
Kris always admitted the landing. “Well, I admit, that did happen,” he told Cowboys & Indians. The rest, he said, was off. “I think he told the story that I got out of the helicopter with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other. But he wasn’t even in the house.”
And the beer? “I never would have been drinking while flying a helicopter,” Kris said. He also told Uncut magazine, “Believe me, you need two hands to fly those things.”
June, he insisted, wasn’t home either, but he let them both keep their version. “I never was going to contradict either one of them.”
In 2009, Kris sat down in Austin, Texas, with the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum and told the story himself.
Kris tells how he landed at Johnny Cash’s house
Kris said the landing “didn’t do me any good.” What helped was a stage. Johnny brought him out during his set at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival, and Kris sang “Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
Johnny recorded “Sunday Morning Coming Down” live at the Ryman Auditorium for his ABC TV show. It went to No. 1 on the country chart, and in 1970 it won Kris the CMA Award for Song of the Year. “Actually, it was the song that allowed me to quit working for a living,” Kris told NPR in 2013. Johnny’s own channel posted that TV performance.
Johnny Cash sings Kris’s song on his TV show
Johnny passed away in 2003, and Kris passed away in 2024 at 88. They became close friends and later toured as the Highwaymen with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Kris told Cowboys & Indians that at one point Johnny carried the words to one of his songs in his wallet.
“For me, that was as good as having a gold record or something,” Kris said.