It is an advocation to follow your dreams, and honour your talent, and it inspired the young Kristofferson to turn his back on his military career and take a job as a janitor in Nashville to be closer to country music. That was around the same time the trained pilot borrowed a helicopter to land on Johnny Cash’s lawn and try to sell him some songs. Kristofferson’s mother wrote him a letter disowning him for embarrassing the family. Johnny Cash read it and joked, “Isn’t it nice to get a letter from home?”
I saw Kristofferson play a couple of times in his old age, and they were utterly spellbinding concerts, in which he stood alone on stage, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. His voice was gravelly and missing a few notes by then, his playing rudimentary, but the expression of hard-earned wisdom in life was mesmerising.
His belief in the power of music shone through his whole existence. It is there at the centre of The Heart, a touching Kristofferson song about his own late father, on which he sings “the heart is all that matters in the end”. That really was the underlying message. His talking country blues To Beat The Devil offers an eloquent protest against the defeatist notion that music cannot change anything. On stage in London 16 years ago, he introduced it by saying “I ain’t saying I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothin’ then I stole his song.” There’s an epitaph to carve into his grave.
Kris Kristofferson helped many of us make it through many long nights. His songs will surely go on doing the same good work even now that the great man is not around to sing them.