“Everything I’ve Got, They’ve Taken It”: Why Kris Kristofferson Wasn’t Afraid To Stand Behind His Sad Songs

Music can often be a source of comfort for people and can help them through their darkest, most difficult times. There’s nothing like hearing a musician perfectly express how you’re feeling. And that’s something that singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson understood all too well.

With songs like “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down”, “Help Me Make It Through The Night”, and “Me And Bobby McGee”, Kristofferson had a reputation for writing sad songs. But he didn’t consider that to be a bad thing.

“You can only write about what you know,” Kristofferson once said in response to criticism of his sad songs. “I don’t think my songs are wallowing in self-pity. F-ck, the letters I get say, ‘That’s the way I feel but I couldn’t put it down in words.’ I’m not tryin’ to pull people down. I’ve had letters from these old girls who were fixin’ to do ’emselves in and then they heard something on the album which struck a chord in them.”

Kristofferson was also known for taboo subject matter for the time. The New York Times called him the “odd man out” in Nashville. Time magazine declared he was the “most controversial country songwriter-singer of the day.”

Kris Kristofferson Was a Vulnerable Songwriter Above Anything Else

Kristofferson preferred songwriting to performing, and he preferred other artists’ versions of his songs to his own.

“The thing I got into this for was to write, and it’s getting harder and harder to write,” he told The Guardian in 1972. “I know I’m not a good performer and I don’t care. It’s not false modesty – I just don’t enjoy it, except when it’s good and that’s rare.”

He was often hailed as one of the best songwriters of his time. As one of the pioneers of outlaw country, with songs that shifted from the famous Nashville Sound to being more raw and introspective, he had a giant influence on country music, and no one summed it up better than Bob Dylan, who said, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”

Many of Kristofferson’s songs were made famous thanks to recordings by other artists, and he earned several Grammy nominations for his work. His songs were also often deeply personal, which is likely what made them resonate so much with his fans.