Kris Kristofferson, who died September 28, might be my favorite country songwriter. He understood the beauty of language like perhaps no other lyricist in popular music, including Bob Dylan. His classic songs were filled with verbosely flowing lines that nonetheless made sense to millions of listeners, including awestruck fellow musicians.
His storied life included stints as a Rhodes Scholar, a college athlete, a military officer, a janitor at Columbia Records, and a Hollywood actor. But with or without this resume, his lyrics included unparalleled descriptions of loneliness, loss, and longing that have resonated for generations.
When I was 14, I heard Johnny Cash sing Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down“, and the last line of the final verse, about a bell that “echoed through the canyons like the disappearin’ dreams of yesterday”, hit me like a truck. I felt those damn disappearing dreams of yesterday, and I was a kid. That’s what a great songwriter can do.
Many years later, watching Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary, I got chills watching musician Larry Gatlin, a friend of Kristofferson, say, “I think he’s the greatest lyricist in the English language.” He recites the lyrics of “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” to demonstrate, and the honor seems challenging to refute.
Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics were lofty but down to earth, especially regarding sex and drugs. However, freedom is sometimes misunderstood in his lyrics and American culture. Most notably, in “Me and Bobby McGee“, Kristofferson wrote, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” which could mean that people are at their most free when stripped of dignity, expectations, and possessions.
However, another way to interpret it is about the myth of freedom. In the first chorus, freedom refers to being broke and ambivalent (“Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free”), and in the second, it refers to being loveless and single (“Nothin’ left is all she left for me”). Being free of money and love strikes the listener as a different kind of freedom: not the kind full of wild possibility and exceptionalism that many understand as at the heart of US conceptions of freedom, but instead one filled with potential despair. In dialogue with the dominant understanding of American freedom, Kristofferson’s conception could be considered resistant, if not subversive.
One of the things that struck me when watching Burns’ documentary in its coverage of Kristofferson was the songwriter’s evolving conception of freedom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In three segments in the episode “Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1968-1972)”, Burns and writer Dayton Duncan highlight Kristofferson’s uniqueness and innovations as a songwriter, including how he “elevated what was possible to say in a country song”, but going from segment to segment, I noticed a distinct shift in ideas of freedom.
In the first, the film discusses Kris Kristofferson’s background and his family disowning him after he turned his back on an elite path for a life in country music. The first of Kristofferson’s songs that it highlights is “Me and Bobby McGee”, which focuses on economic freedom and the pathos of lost love.
In the second, the filmmakers point to Kristofferson’s use of sex as a theme in songs like “Help Me Make It through the Night” and “For the Good Times“, sometimes to the chagrin of the country music establishment, as well as that of drugs in “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”. I understood this as pointing to Kristofferson’s emphasis on freedom with potential hedonistic pleasures: “free love”, sex without attachment, and drug use.
Near the end of the episode, the film tells the story of Kristofferson’s biggest hit as a singer, “Why Me“, in which he appears to find freedom and happiness in Christian salvation. Thus, from the film, I understood his evolution as a songwriter as focusing on, first, economic freedom, then, sexual freedom, and finally, freedom in dedicating his life to Jesus.
However, contrary to Burns’ narratives of American exceptionalism, I suspect Kris Kristofferson’s songwriting illuminates something more terrifying about the nature of freedom in the US: not how it shifts from one arena to another, but how it isn’t real.
In the 21st century, authors like novelist Elaine Castillo and historian Ira Berlin have offered alternatives to the stale narrative of American freedom. The standard version is that the United States is “a city on a hill”, an exceptional place where everyone can do what they want. That idea is false, mainly because the US was built on stolen land because of genocide and slave labor.
The US emphasizes the privilege of supposedly having freedom. But that’s just it: if not everyone has it, it’s not free. One need only look at contemporary mass incarceration to see how over two million citizens are deprived of their rights to illuminate the inherent contradictions of calling the US a free country.
It’s not only the incarcerated, of course; it’s also many overlapping marginalized groups in the US, including people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ people, undocumented people, disabled people, and poor and working-class people who lack privilege and any tangible concept of freedom for those parts of their identities.
Castillo writes about the idea of inheritance as opposed to freedom: “knowing ourselves as fundamentally made possible by–and fundamentally reliant upon–other people”, rather than as exceptional as individuals or as a nation (“Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions” in How to Read Now, Viking, 2022). This idea connotes the interconnectedness of art, broadly speaking, and its surrounding contexts.
When considering Kristofferson’s work through this lens, I think about not only the idea of individual freedom for the narrator or couples in “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)“, but of ideas of freedom as social and contextual–inherently tied to and limited by other nations, peoples, and cultures, and thus, not freedom at all.
When he wrote, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”, that could also be a metaphor for destroying illusions about freedom. He’s undoubtedly not romanticizing the idea of freedom here–of lost love, money, or opportunities. In “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”, however, he seems to believe more genuinely in the idea of freedom: “I have seen the morning burning golden on the mountain in the skies / Aching with the feeling of the freedom of an eagle when she flies.”
That first line forms a majestic image, and he goes on to compare this sunrise to a lover’s smile. But in the second, “aching with the feeling” of freedom refers to an appearance of an abundance of freedom and choice (as opposed to an ache from experiencing scarcity) as what the sun and an eagle share because even for them, nothing happens without consequence. Therefore, freedom is an illusion, an artificial construct–much like the United States of America. Too often, the idea of freedom of choice and a free country leads to entitlement whereby people, including leaders, think they can do whatever they want to other people and nations with impunity. Of course, everything has consequences, and the eagle, a classic symbol of American exceptionalism, may seem to be free as it soars, but the artificial feeling of freedom is a fairer representation of this song and its lasting impact, especially as the love in the song is fleeting.
In addition, even some historians who study the history of American freedom acknowledge the paradox at the heart of it, which Edmund S. Morgan called “the central paradox of American history”: that the establishment of some people’s (supposed) freedom depended on the concurrent enslavement–the lack of freedom–of another (“Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox”, The Journal of American History, June 1972, Vol. 59, No. 1).
Related to that history, Ira Berlin, another historian, proposes an alternative model of viewing the history of Black Americans in the US instead of a linear “from slavery to freedom” narrative: Berlin convincingly reads such history as a series of migrations, from the transatlantic passages of slavery to global international Black migration to the United States in the 21st century. (The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations, Viking Adult, 2010). In this alternative narrative, Berlin emphasizes movement and place-making new roots and holding down roots–as simultaneous forces throughout Black American history.
Berlin and Morgan have made me rethink conceptions of freedom, as I suspect Black Americans have long treated freedom as liberation, as opposed to freedom as (whites’ or any other dominant group’s) entitlement and privilege.
However, this begs yet another question: What happens when we “free” ourselves of the illusion of freedom? How do we rid ourselves of the illusion of American national and individual exceptionalism? What can we replace it with?
I believe that we can replace it with a greater sense of collective responsibility and agency to better the US and the planet, as well as with such concepts as Castillo’s idea of inheritance. As much as I and many listeners and readers understand art in terms of our responses, what if we defined such reactions in terms of larger communities and cultures?
With Kris Kristofferson’s work, perhaps the best way to understand his tremendous achievements is in relation to others: not as free or unattached to constraints, but as inheriting different literary and musical traditions. Kristofferson studied William Blake, William Shakespeare, and other poets as a Rhodes Scholar, which he combined in his songwriting sensibility with his love of country greats like Hank Williams. It doesn’t detract from his uniqueness as a songwriter to place him in a larger cultural and historical framework of art.
Still, it’s tempting to only appreciate him as an individual for his exceptional lyricism and versatility. However, he was a part of a greater scene in music of different kinds of rebels and outlaws, including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash, with whom he collaborated as part of the Highwaymen in the 1980s.
It’s also possible to think of Kristofferson in relation to geniuses of his time from other genres. In the 1970s, as authors like Kelefa Sanneh, Reebee Garofalo, and Steve Waksman have written, music fragmented into more defined markets and genres. However, that doesn’t mean Kristofferson should only be viewed in the context of country music. He doubtlessly belongs in the company of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye as a songwriter because of his very personal vision that, like others, was tremendously appealing and applicable to large audiences across demographics and genres.
Thus, perhaps one of the most surprising feats of Kris Kristofferson’s career–and that of other great songwriters of his time–is how he fit within and transcended musical boundaries with his songwriting. He was proudly a country songwriter, but his songs were recorded by everyone from Dylan to Janis Joplin, which proves the porousness of genres, even as genre definitions became more rigid in the 1970s and after.
Referring back to “Me and Bobby McGee”, Kristofferson’s songwriting could be interpreted as being about the duality in ideas of American freedom: the emphasis on freedom as a lack of limitations and the reality that a world without limitations and consequences doesn’t exist. That kind of tension and complexity informs Kristofferson’s classic songs.
If anything, freedom is ambivalent in Kristofferson’s songwriting, which contrasts sharply with the dominant culture of conservatism in country music in the 1970s and today: think of Donald Trump deploying Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” in his campaign.
I much prefer to think of Black country artist Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me” as in the country tradition of rebellion and resistance: “If you think we live in the land of the free, you should try to be Black like me.” Her music and many other country artists who are women, people of color, and/or LGBTQIA+ prove that Greenwood is not the first or the last voice on country music’s dominant nationalism.
In today’s climate of hostility to discussions of race and other socially constructed forms of difference, where books get banned for discussing marginalized identities, artists who question dominant ideas of American freedom–including Kristofferson–offer a way forward. If, as he wrote, “freedom’s just another word”, questioning dominant ideas of American freedom is a potently important endeavor.