I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but I do remember just wearing that record out after landing upon it in my early 20s. I then kept the album it was on close by my turntable through that tumultuous decade of struggles and thrashings for identity, vocation, love, the meaning of life and my place in the world.
Kristofferson died this week at a much older age (88) than he had anticipated reaching in his younger years. He was a gifted man in multiple ways—artistic, intellectual, physical—but none of those gifts allowed for escape from the struggle to discover and give form to his life’s work.
In his case, that struggle included climbing out from under a domineering father who leaned on him to pursue a military career and later on, at least an equally domineering drinking habit that nearly derailed his very life through the 1960s-’70s.
Kristofferson sketched the barely flickering embers of his protagonist’s quest for meaning by placing him on the sidewalks on Sunday morning, the slow day of rest, sabbath, the streets quiet and the air redolent with ‘fryin’ chicken’ at sit-down family brunches where he will not have a seat.
“I never expected to live past 30,” he told “People” magazine in 1998, remembering his self-described “functioning alcoholic” years that included a long tour through bourbon and tequila and the drug overdose death of his one-time paramour Janis Joplin in 1970. Hauntingly, her posthumous “Pearl” album the following year included her cover of another brilliant Kristofferson song, “Me and Bobby McGee,” which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the “Billboard 100” chart of the time.
But for all the travails that come with a hard-drinking life, some artists manage to perform feats of alchemy that plumb depths of experience and feeling beyond debauchery and turn it into creative gold.
In those depths, it’s either wallow and grab another bottle, or, in Kristofferson’s era, pick up pen and paper to explore the dislocation, loneliness and desperation that likely drove him to drink in the first place.
Few songs have ever reflected that journey with as much naked, plaintive wailing to the heavens as “Sunday Mornin’….”
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You’d never know it from the imagery of a lonely and hungover drunk having a beer for breakfast (and then “one more for dessert”), but our narrator graduated summa cum laude in literature from an elite private college, where he nursed ambitions to become a writer while also competing in rugby, football and track. Then it was onto Oxford University in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he picked up another degree in philosophy and a habit of picking at guitars and writing songs.
After which he did follow his father’s dictates, at least initially, by becoming an Army Ranger and helicopter pilot based in West Germany, eventually achieving the rank of captain. After his tour of duty, he was offered a job teaching literature at West Point, a sweet and secure professorial career stretching out before him until retirement.
Kristofferson moved to Nashville instead, scandalizing his family by becoming an itinerant musician with a studio job that he later described as basically “cleaning the ashtrays” while performers were making records—one of those performers being Johnny Cash.
Importantly, he eventually snagged a side gig as a helicopter pilot for the National Guard. That came to figure prominently in his musical career a little later on when he diverted from a training run to land his chopper on Cash’s front lawn and presented him with “some tapes” that did not include “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” He’d made several previous attempts to interest Cash in his music that had come to naught, but this gambit finally succeeded in grabbing his attention.
You can pick up the story in Kristofferson’s own words below, fast-forwarding the first 45 seconds unless you want to hear a promo for the Musicians Hall of Fame. It is one of those “and the rest is history” kind of stories, highlighted by Cash finally landing upon “Sunday Mornin’…,” singing it right up to a chart-topper and firmly establishing Kristofferson as a force in the musical world for decades to come.
The full lyrics follow the video, after which we will return for some concluding comments.
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SUNDAY MORNIN’ COMIN’ DOWN
Well, I woke up Sunday mornin’ with
No way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
So I had one more for dessert
Then I fumbled to my closet through my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt
I washed my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day
I’d smoked my mind the night before
With cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’
But I lit my first and watched a small kid
Cussin’ at a can that he was kickin’
Then I walked across the street
And caught the Sunday smell of someone’s fryin’ chicken
And Lord, it took me back to somethin’ that I’d lost
Somewhere, somehow along the way
On a Sunday mornin’ sidewalk
Wishin’, Lord, that I was stoned
‘Cause there’s somethin’ in a Sunday
Makes a body feel alone
There ain’t nothin’ short o’ dyin’
That’s half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleepin’ city sidewalk
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down
In the park I saw a daddy
With a laughin’ little girl that he was swingin’
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the songs they were singin’
Then I headed down the street
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’
And it echoed through the canyons
Like the disappearin’ dreams of yesterday
On a Sunday mornin’ sidewalk
I’m wishin’, Lord, that I was stoned
‘Cause there’s somethin’ in a Sunday
That makes a body feel alone
And there’s nothin’ short a’ dyin’
That’s half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleepin’ city sidewalk
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down
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As a young man, I don’t think I ever felt the sustained desperation that Kristofferson chronicles in this lonesome howl for relief from the sheer weight of existence. But “sustained” is the key word there, I think.
Kristofferson’s struggle to emerge from the shadow of his father’s dreams for him and to forge a path to his true passion in music led him down byways of addiction and anomie that only occasionally poked their heads in for a look-see into my soul. But the experience of random wanderings through lonely streets, of wondering about the “What for” and “Why?” of life, of watching from a park bench “a daddy/With a laughin’ little girl that he was swingin’’,” resonated profoundly at the time.
In fact, I would contend that unless young persons have wrestled with existential angst and the undertow of struggle for authentic engagement with people and the riddles life sets before them, either the reckoning will only come later, perhaps in more drastic and dispiriting forms, or they will live a life too constrained by certainty (which correlates almost perfectly with lack of curiosity, I suspect) to afford the depth of feeling that beckons to them from beyond.
In other words, one can, with great effort, fend off the struggle for identity, but loss will come in one form or other regardless.
For his part, Kristofferson sketched the barely flickering embers of his protagonist’s quest for meaning by placing him on the sidewalks on Sunday morning, the slow day of rest, sabbath, the streets quiet and the air redolent with “fryin’ chicken” at sit-down family brunches where he will not have a seat. It’s a beautiful conjuring of an essential loneliness to existence, rectified only in relationship with something more sustaining than one’s next drink or joint.
It took a while for Kristofferson to find his way there, but when he did, the music flowed freely and his grins were those of a truly happy and content man—one who found himself on the right side of the personal history he had pursued with all the doggedness of a helicopter pilot daring to land on God’s front lawn and knowing he was welcome there, for eternity.
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Like many singer-songwriters, Kristofferson frequently made tweaks to his original lyrics, trying out a new word, dropping some off, in some versions dropping entire stanzas for the sake of a time-bound gig. This full version performed late in his life is in many ways more poignant than those of his younger years, while still almost completely faithful to the original.
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Didn’t quite get around to mentioning the acting career that ran parallel to Kristofferson’s music ventures. It saw him appear in an astonishing 87 (I counted) movies and another 32 television series and films between 1971 and 2018. Not all of them were Academy Award material, but this star turn with Barbra Streisand below burned up the airwaves and box office nearly a half-century ago, with the two of them retaining a warm rest-of-life friendship that saw Streisand lamenting his passing here the other day.
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All 49 songs in this series can be found here, with titles and opening paragraphs, most recent first
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Lonely street by Isi Parente, Calgary, Canada https://unsplash.com/@isiparente
Kris Kristofferson by Morten Jensen, Denmark https://www.flickr.com/people/mortenofdenmark/
Kris Kristofferson is one of those artists whose songs preceded stardom. Patsy Cline turned Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” into a huge hit in 1961 when he was working primarily as a studio musician and DJ. Carole King composed a string of signature hits for others (Up on the Roof, Loco-motion, Will You Love Me Tomorrow and A Natural Woman).
I was fortunate enough to see Kris perform twice. The first time was at UCLA in 1969, some two years before Johnny Cash’s recorded “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” He was largely unknown at the time. However, some in Nashville had already realized his talent. Roger Miller sang “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Darby’s Castle” on one of his early albums. Bill Nash sang “For the Good Times” before it became a huge hit for Ray Price. Soul singer Percy Sledge’s cut “Help Me Make It Through the Night” before Sammi Smith’s took it to #1 on the country chart. The second time I heard him was in 1975. He and Rita Coolidge, his wife at the time, were now household names. By then, his Hollywood career was full-blown. Ironically, in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”, he didn’t compose the score. That honor and Grammy belonged to Dylan. The scene of Slim Pickens’ dying to “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” is stunning. That alone was worth the price of admission. Unfortunately, we’re now getting to the age when so many of the singers whose albums we wore out have either retired or passed away.
Have thought & intended hundreds of times to see “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” but it has never worked out, so a good prompt here, Robert, thanks. Kristofferson was such a fine poetic writer but in watching the interview above we got to see a man doing what he could to shrug off his greatness, and his modesty didn’t seem the least bit false. I suspect he loved getting to act across from James Coburn under the direction of Peckinpah, with Dylan supplying the music—the whole thing probably tickled him silly…