Headline : Kris Kristofferson: 20 Essential Songs

Read more from the original article on here at www.rollingstone.com.

---

No. of Paragraph 22

As far as country songwriters go — or songwriters of any genre — Kris Kristofferson was among the most authentic. That’s a word that Nashville loves to freely toss around, but in the case of the Texas native, it was appropriate. Kristofferson knew intimately about the tales of love and loss, peaks and valleys, and drunken nights and regret-filled mornings that he wrote about. He experienced and endured them and, in turn, they birthed his songs, from “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’” and “Why Me?” to “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “To Beat the Devil.” These are his essential works.

One of Kristofferson’s defining songs, the mostly spoken track off his debut album tells the story of a songwriter who encounters Beelzebub in a bar and listens as ol’ Satan tries to quash his dreams. “If you waste your time a-talkin’/to the people who don’t listen/to the things that you are sayin’/who do you think’s gonna hear?” the devil taunts him. But the troubadour has the last laugh: drinking the beer that Lucifer bought him and making off with his song. It was a metaphor for the music business that Kristofferson disciples like Eric Church took to heart; Church even titled his recent one-man-show after the song. In a recitation intro, Kristofferson dedicated the song to Johnny Cash and June Carter — “who helped show me how to beat the devil,” he says. —J.H.

Kristofferson didn’t usually write on assignment, but when he received a call from Monument Records founder Fred Foster — who suggested a song title based off a secretary he knew — Kristofferson wanted to impress him. “I avoided him for three or four months because there were only thoughts running through my head,” he said in 1973. “I was driving back to New Orleans one night, the windshield wipers were going, and it started falling together.” Inspired by the Fellini film La Strada (Italian for “the road”), Kristofferson crafted a country stomper about two drifters. It became Janis Joplin’s only Number One hit, which Kristofferson only heard after her death in 1970. “Afterwards, I walked all over L.A., just in tears,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t listen to the song without really breaking up.” —A.M.

A masterwork ballad of longing, “Help Me Make It Throught the Night” was recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Tina Turner and, most famously, Sammi Smith. Smith had a Number One hit with a smooth-voiced rendition of the song, but Kristofferson’s version, off his self-titled 1970 debut, is hard to beat. The ache in his croak just can’t be beat, and when he sings the chorus, you genuinely fear he may not see the morning’s light. —J.H.

Read more from the original article on here at www.rollingstone.com.

Related Headlines : Kris Kristofferson: 20 Essential Songs (in Google.com):

Hello, below you have a "Web" tab to read more content and an "Image" tab to get related pictures

Example : Trends, Country, News, Jobs, Scholarships, Investment, Business, Politics, Adverts, Fashion, Events, Technology and more.