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RIP Kris Kristofferson

The man was an American Icon.

"Kris Kristofferson’s life is unprecedented, and won’t be replicated.

Born Kristoffer Kristofferson in the border town of Brownsville, Texas on June 22, 1936, Kristofferson changed the language of country music, with extraordinary internal rhymes, Shakespearean iambic pentameter, and socially progressive subject matters that found the personal within the political.

He was an Oxford scholar, a defensive back, a bartender, a Golden Gloves boxer, a gandy dancer, a forest-fighter, a road crew member, and an Army Ranger who flew helicopters. He was a peacenik, a revolutionary, an actor, a superstar, a Casanova, and a family man. He was almost a teacher at West Point, though he gave that up to become a Nashville songwriting bum.

Sam Peckinpah cast him as Billy the Kid. Willie Nelson recorded an entire album of his songs, then joined him in supergroup The Highwaymen, with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Muhammad Ali sat side-stage at his concerts. Mama Cass Elliot called him “No Eyes.” Atlantic Monthly published his short stories."

 
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Damn it. I listened to him so much, probably too much, when I was around 10. My parents were getting a divorce and I always seemed to find honesty, sometimes painful honesty, in his lyrics.

He wrote this song that I was sure was about my Dad destroying himself as he struggled with alcohol.

 

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