Kris Kristofferson, who died Saturday at the age of 88, was truly one of the greatest songwriters of the past 60 years. No less an eminence than Bob Dylan said of him, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”
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. Yet his songs often spoke
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