Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar and Army Ranger before Nashville
Before he wrote Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson had published prize-winning essays in The Atlantic, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, trained as an Army Ranger and helicopter pilot, and been lined up to teach literature at West Point. He hoped songs would help make him a novelist.
Born in Brownsville, Texas, on June 22, 1936, he was the eldest of three children of an Army Air Corps officer who rose to major general and pushed his son toward the military. The family moved often before settling in San Mateo, California. At 17 he spent a summer working for a dredging firm on Wake Island in the Pacific.
At Pomona College he majored in literature under Frederick Sontag, whom he regarded as a major influence, worked construction and fought fires, and was featured in Sports Illustrated in 1958 for rugby, football and athletics. He graduated summa cum laude that year and went to Merton College, Oxford. There the promoter Larry Parnes tried to market him as a Yank at Oxford, and he recorded unsuccessfully as Kris Carson before earning a further degree in 1960.
In 1961 he married Fran Beer and joined the Army, completing Ranger School and helicopter training and serving as a captain with the 8th Infantry Division in West Germany, where he formed a band for service clubs. After that posting ended in 1965, he was assigned to teach English literature at West Point.
Music won. Signed to Monument Records in 1969, he wrote For the Good Times, Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down and Help Me Make It Through the Night, songs that became hits for other singers and helped launch outlaw country's rawer, more introspective alternative to polished Nashville. His own recordings Why Me and Highwayman topped the country chart in 1973 and 1985, the latter with the supergroup the Highwaymen, which he belonged to from 1985 to 1995. He also built a film career, working twice with Sam Peckinpah, starring in A Star Is Born in 1976 and appearing in the Blade trilogy. He entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004, won three Grammys, and died on September 28, 2024, aged 88.
Source: Kris Kristofferson
