ARCADIAN COLUMN: Reflections on the life and passing of a special poet

Back in 1972 I was at my buddy Buford’s house, playing Monopoly with him, his sister Lucy, and others. Buford said, “You gotta hear this record,” and proceeded to put an album on their turntable and fired it up.

That was the first time I ever heard Kris Kristofferson’s voice, and I’ve been hearing it ever since.

Who remembers when he performed a concert in Port Charlotte? More on that later.

The album Buford played for me was “Border Lord,” and by no means was it a commercial success, and it even received bad reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, wherein they not only talked bad about the songs, but were unkind about the artist himself.

Who cares? I liked what I heard — an unpolished voice that had something to say. And I feel his gravelly voice lent credence to the pictures he painted in the minds and hearts of those who took time to listen.

Nobody I know ever said he had a great singing voice. But his lyrics? Pure poetry, the likes that no one in the country music business had ever heard before.

He bummed around Nashville, pitching his songs while working as a janitor at Columbia Records, but nobody wanted them. That is, until Johnny Cash recorded “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Cash himself said that’s when other artists were suddenly scrounging around for the songs they’d been offered.

And pretty soon we heard Ray Price doing “For the Good Times,” Sammi Smith singing “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” and even Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobbie McGee,” which she’d recorded before her death in 1970. Roger Miller recorded that one first, for the record, and had success with it. Many others added other songs of his to their repertoires.

I’ve loved music all my life and got my first flat-top acoustic guitar in 1993 and began teaching myself some chords while sitting in an old church pew on my back porch. The first song I learned was “Me and Bobbie McGee.” I chose that one because I could do it with only three chords and didn’t have to switch between them very fast. Now I play a couple hundred songs from memory and at least 30 of them were penned by Kristofferson.

The Port Charlotte Town Center mall held it’s grand opening on Aug. 16, 1989. It was the 20th anniversary of the opening of that famous Woodstock concert, the 12th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, and there was even a moon eclipse that night. Anyway, I read that Kristofferson would be performing there, by the food court, so you can bet your britches I was going to be there.

I sat up late that night, drawing and coloring a caricature of him, and got there way early and sat in a front row folding chair for about an hour with my daughter Kim and my cousin Denise.

He performed for an hour and a half, and in his band was Billy Swann, whose song “I Can Help” was a big hit in 1974. I mouthed the words to his songs right along with him, and he did give me a few curious looks, as so many shoppers just wandered by, clueless as to who he was. My buddy Bill Hackney was there and kidded me afterwards about singing along.

I took some good photos that day, but the best part was when I held up my caricature to show him. Without missing a beat and holding his microphone in his left hand, he kept singing and took the pen from me and autographed my drawing. It was surreal, to say the least, and I still have it.

He summed up his life and the lives of his fellow struggling songwriters in the lines of his song “The Pilgrim Chapter 33,” which was his age at the time, with “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, takin’ every wrong direction on that lonely way back home.”

Some of his songs that most have never heard of that I feel are quite poetic include “Darby’s Castle,” “Casey’s Last Ride,” “Duvalier’s Dream,” “Loving Her Was Easier,” “To Beat the Devil,” and so many more.

Many only remember him for “Why Me, Lord,” or for co-writing “One Day at a Time.” A number of his songs made social statements, such as, “They Killed Him, “Shipwrecked in the Eighties,” “The Law is For Protection of the People,” “Broken Freedom Song,” and others.

He was an actor as well, though not known as a great one. His biggest impact was probably in the 1976 version of “A Star is Born,” portraying the declining, doomed rocker John Norman Howard. He also had great success in recordings and tours as one of the Highwaymen, a country supergroup that included Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.

I’m sad to see him gone, but am grateful for the song catalog he left in our care, to listen to and admire. I’m grateful that my buddy Buford put that record on for me that day. And I’m most grateful for having lived during Kris Kristofferson’s lifetime.