Kris Kristofferson

I never really read much about Kris Kristofferson, but I always considered him a great songwriter. So after reading up on him a bit, I was amazed at the rich life he has lived.

Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, to parents Mary Ann (née Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Kristofferson, a U.S. Army Air Corps (later U.S. Air Force) major general.  As is common with many military families[citation needed], military service was a multi-generational tradition: Kristofferson's paternal grandfather was also an officer (in the Swedish Army). When Kristofferson was a child, his father pushed him toward a military career. Like most "military brats", Kristofferson moved around frequently as a youth, finally settling down in San Mateo, California, where he graduated from San Mateo High School. An aspiring writer, Kristofferson enrolled in Pomona College in 1954.

He experienced his first dose of fame when he appeared in Sports Illustrated's "Faces In The Crowd" for his achievements in collegiate rugby union, football, and track and field. He and fellow classmates revived the Claremont Colleges Rugby Club in 1958, which has remained a Southern California rugby dynasty. Kristofferson became a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Pomona College, graduating in 1958 with a BA, summa cum laude in Literature. In a 2004 interview with Pomona College Magazine Kristofferson mentioned philosophy professor Frederick Sontag as an important influence in his life.

Kristofferson earned a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where his college was Merton. While at Oxford he was awarded his blue for boxing and began writing songs. With the help of his manager, Larry Parnes, he recorded for Top Rank Records under the name Kris Carson. Parnes was working to sell Kris as "a Yank at Oxford" to the British Public and Kristofferson was willing to take that sell with the end goal of getting rich and becoming a novelist. This early phase of his music career was unsuccessful. 

In 1960, Kristofferson graduated with a BPhil in English literature and married an old girlfriend, Fran Beer. Kristofferson ultimately joined the U.S. Army and achieved the rank of captain. He became a helicopter pilot after receiving flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He also completed Ranger School. During the early 1960s, he was deployed to West Germany as a member of the 8th Infantry Division. It was during this time that he resumed his music career and formed a band. In 1965, when his tour of duty ended, Kristofferson was offered a position as a professor of English Literature at West Point. Instead, he decided to leave the Army and pursue songwriting professionally.

Kristofferson sent some of his compositions to a friend's relative, Marijohn Wilkin, a successful Nashville, Tennessee songwriter. After being honorably discharged from the Army in 1965, Kristofferson moved to Nashville. He worked at a variety of odd jobs while struggling for success in music, burdened with medical expenses resulting from his son's defective esophagus. He and his wife soon divorced. He got a job sweeping floors at Columbia Studios in Nashville. There he met Johnny Cash, who initially accepted some of Kristofferson's songs but chose not to use them. During Kristofferson's janitorial stint for Columbia, Bob Dylan recorded his landmark 1966 album Blonde on Blonde at the studio. Though he had the opportunity to watch some of Dylan's recording sessions, Kristofferson never met Dylan out of fear that he would be fired for approaching him.

He also worked as a commercial helicopter pilot at that time for a south Louisiana firm called Petroleum Helicopters International (PHI), based in Lafayette, Louisiana. Kristofferson recalled of his days as a pilot, "That was about the last three years before I started performing, before people started cutting my songs... I would work a week down here [in south Louisiana] for PHI, sitting on an oil platform and flying helicopters. Then I'd go back to Nashville at the end of the week and spend a week up there trying to pitch the songs, then come back down and write songs for another week... I can remember 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' I wrote sitting on top of an oil platform. I wrote 'Bobby Mcgee' down here, and a lot of them [in south Louisiana]."

And that's just a sample. had an acting career, dated Janis Joplin, married Rita Coolidge, etc. Here's one my favorites that he wrote...