Country Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      10 Unforgettable Kris Kristofferson Covers

      by

      Many of his songs are better known by other singers’ interpretations, like Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and more.Laura Roberts/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,“You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris,” Bob Dylan once said of Kris Kristofferson, who died on Saturday, “because he changed everything.”That’s high praise coming from Dylan, especially considering that when they first crossed paths in Nashville’s Columbia Recording Studios in 1966, Dylan was recording his opus “Blonde on Blonde” — and Kristofferson was the studio’s janitor, lingering in the halls with his own dreams of songwriting glory. A few years later, he’d finally achieve them, thanks to artists like Ray Price, Roger Miller and Johnny Cash, who all had hits with early Kristofferson compositions. Then came Janis Joplin’s rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee,” which posthumously topped the pop chart and gave Kristofferson, as he once put it, “the biggest shot of fame that I ever got at that time. It was never the same after that.”Though a household name thanks mostly to his acting career, Kristofferson never achieved more than modest success as a solo recording artist. I happen to love that gruff, mumbly Everyman quality of his voice, but I recognize that it’s an acquired taste. That’s probably why so many Kristofferson songs are better known by other singers’ interpretations, whether it’s Joplin’s “Bobby McGee,” Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or a whole host of other musicians who have tackled his breakthrough breakup ballad “For the Good Times.”Today’s playlist is a compilation of some of the best of those covers, from artists as varied as Al Green, Waylon Jennings and Tom Verlaine. If you’d like to hear Kristofferson’s words in his own ragged drawl, consider this a companion piece to the excellent playlist that Jon Pareles put together, featuring 12 of Kristofferson’s essential songs.Lastly, a quick programming note: I’m going to be taking the next few weeks off from writing The Amplifier so I can get some work done on the book I’ve been trying to write. I have a few great guest playlisters lined up while I’m out, and they’ll be sending you an Amplifier once a week, each Tuesday. Enjoy their eclectic selections, and you’ll hear from me again soon!I ain’t saying I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Garth Brooks Is Accused of Rape and Assault in Lawsuit

      by

      A woman who worked as a hair and makeup stylist for the country superstar says he subjected her to repeated advances. Mr. Brooks did not immediately respond to the allegations.Garth Brooks, one of country music’s biggest stars, has been accused of sexual assault by a woman who said he raped her in a Los Angeles hotel room and subjected her to repeated unwanted sexual advances over a period of about two years, according to a lawsuit filed in a California court on Thursday.The woman was not named in court papers but was described as a hair and makeup stylist who worked with Mr. Brooks from 2017 to about 2020. In that time, her suit says, he repeatedly harassed her, describing graphic sexual fantasies and in one instance placing her hands on his genitals when he came out of a shower.A spokeswoman for Mr. Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Brooks, 62, is a star of the highest order in the world of country music and beyond, a household name who has sold tens of millions of albums and, decades into his career, still plays to stadiums full of adoring fans. He has also long been devoted to charitable organizations, particularly those focused on children and local relief after natural disasters.But the suit accuses him of preying on a woman working for him and then trying to silence her.Litigation over the woman’s accusation began three weeks ago with an anonymous suit filed in federal court in Mississippi. In that case — called John Doe v. Jane Roe — a man identified only as “a celebrity and public figure who resides in Tennessee” said that a woman residing in Mississippi had made “false and outrageous allegations of sexual misconduct she claims occurred years ago.” He asked a judge to protect his identity and to declare that the woman’s accusations against him were false.In a filing this week in response, the woman’s lawyers portrayed that lawsuit as a pre-emptive move to silence her, and said that she would be filing her case imminently, which would name the man.The 27-page lawsuit filed by the woman on Thursday, in Los Angeles Superior Court, says she is the same person listed as the defendant in the Mississippi action, and identifies Mr. Brooks as the John Doe plaintiff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Kris Kristofferson: A Life in Pictures

      by

      Kris Kristofferson, who died on Saturday at 88, was most revered for his songwriting, favoring an aphoristic style that surveyed the many detours a life could take. By the time he broke through, at nearly 34 years old, Kristofferson had swerved off prescribed courses a number of times. The son of an Air Force major general and a socially conscious mother, he’d been a Rhodes Scholar, an Army helicopter pilot and a family man before going all in on music in 1965, a decision that splintered his family and left him scuffling for money.“I was working the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs. I’d lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief,” Kristofferson once said of writing “Me and Bobby McGee” in the late 1960s. “I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. It looked like I’d trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people’s expectations, I was somehow free.”By the time success came in 1970 — as Ray Price’s cover of his song “For the Good Times” reached the Top 40 on the pop chart, and Johnny Cash’s version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit — Kristofferson had experienced love, loss and hard times, all of which gave his career a hard-earned sagacity as it expanded over the next 50 years.Here are some snapshots from his life and career.Kris Kristofferson, an Oxford-educated Army helicopter pilot, turned down a teaching job at West Point to pursue songwriting in Nashville.Al Clayton/Getty ImagesKristofferson, in 1970 or 1971, in a Nashville hotel room listening to a reel-to-reel tape recorder after his appearance on “The Johnny Cash Show.”Al Clayton/Getty ImagesKristofferson in 1970, the year two songs he wrote — “For the Good Times” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down” — became hits for other artists.Al Clayton/Getty ImagesIn the liner notes of his 1971 album, “The Silver Tongued Devil and I,” Kristofferson described his music as “echoes of the going ups and coming downs, walking pneumonia and run-of-the-mill madness, colored with guilt, pride, and a vague sense of despair.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesKristofferson with Janis Joplin in the summer of 1970, shortly before her death in October of that year. Her version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” penned by Kristofferson, went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1971.John Byrne Cooke Estate/Getty ImagesKristofferson starred opposite Barbra Streisand in Frank Pierson’s 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born.”Max B. Miller/Fotos International and Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesKristofferson and Streisand in a publicity photo from “A Star Is Born.” He won a Golden Globe Award for his performance.Screen Archives/Getty ImagesStreisand and Kristofferson at a preview of “A Star Is Born” in New York City in December 1976. She cast Kristofferson as the male lead in the film after seeing him onstage at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, Calif.Suzanne Vlamis/Associated PressKristofferson performing with Olivia Newton-John and Rod Stewart at a UNICEF benefit in New York City in 1979. His work in the 1980s and ’90s would venture into social justice and human rights.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesKristofferson, center, with from left, Candice Bergen, Rita Coolidge, Willie Nelson and Burt Reynolds after a performance at the Bottom Line in New York City in 1979. Kristofferson and Coolidge, who were married for much of the 1970s, released three duet albums before divorcing in 1980.Associated Press/Associated PressKristofferson and Isabelle Huppert, with whom he appeared in the film “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.Associated PressKristofferson with Don King, commentating during a fight between Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali in 1980. Kristofferson, a Golden Gloves boxer in college, was a lifelong fan of the sport.Randy Rasmussen/Associated PressKris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda at the premiere of the film “Rollover” in Los Angeles in 1981.Nick Ut/Associated PressWith Willie Nelson on the set of the film “Songwriter” in 1983.John Bryson/Getty ImagesFrom left, Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kristofferson performing as the Highwaymen in 1985 at Nelson’s Fourth of July picnic in Austin, Texas.Beth Gwinn/Getty ImagesKristofferson, left, with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt in San Francisco in 1989, performing in protest of the war in El Salvador. Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesKristofferson comforted Sinead O’Connor after she was booed at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1992. “It seemed to me very wrong, booing that little girl,” he later said. “But she was always courageous.”Ron Frehm/Associated PressFrom left, Kristofferson, Victoria Williams, Suzanne Vega, Vin Scelsa and Lou Reed backstage at the Bottom Line in New York City in 1994.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesKristofferson joined Streisand onstage in London in 2019 for their duet “Lost Inside of You.” “He was as charming as ever, and the audience showered him with applause,” she wrote on social media after his death.Dave J Hogan/Getty ImagesKristofferson with Charlie McDermott in Vermont in 2005, during a break in the filming of “Disappearances.”Toby Talbot/Associated PressKristofferson performing with Nelson at a concert for Nelson’s 70th birthday in 2003. James Estrin/The New York TimesKristofferson performing at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., in 2007. He retired from performing during the Covid-19 pandemic.Heidi Schumann for The New York Times More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Kris Kristofferson’s Stories Were Wonderfully Larger Than Life

      by

      The singer, songwriter and actor, who died on Saturday at 88, found his way into situations and tales that underscored his role as a conscience for country music.Kris Kristofferson was a man to whom myth attached easily.Did he once take control of a National Guard helicopter so he could land it at Johnny Cash’s house to present him with some songs to consider recording? (He sure did, though Johnny apparently wasn’t home.) Did he not know that Janis Joplin, whom he’d been dating, had recorded his song “Me and Bobby McGee” just a few days before her death? (He didn’t; the track, released posthumously, became her lone No. 1 hit.) Did he once confront Toby Keith, country music’s jingoist in chief, about his performative bluster and ask him, “Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not.” (Depends whose account you believe.)Beginning in the mid-1960s, when he arrived in Nashville as an aspiring songwriter, Kristofferson, who died Saturday at 88, evolved into something of a communal conscience for the town, and the country music business, while also helping to usher it into conversation with the rest of popular music.He was best known as a songwriter, with compositions that bridged folky earthiness with a jolt of literary flair. When sung by some of the biggest country stars of the era — Cash, Ray Price, Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, Bobby Bare — they inexorably moved the genre away from polished and poised singers in sports coats toward thornier territory closer to the folk revival of the 1960s.The protagonists of Kristofferson’s best songs were downtrodden victims of their own poor decisions — “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” the best-known version of which was sung by Cash, finds the singer struggling to find “my cleanest dirty shirt” the morning after a Saturday night bender. “Once More With Feeling,” written with Shel Silverstein and sung by Jerry Lee Lewis, tells the story of a relationship that’s run out of gas through the pleas of a man desperate to be deceived, even for a moment: “Darling, make believe you’re making me/Believe each word you say.”“Me and Bobby McGee” — initially recorded by Miller, but rendered indelible by Joplin — was the tale of two drifters who drift away from each other, anchored in the oft-repeated secular proverb, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Kris Kristofferson: 12 Essential Songs

      by

      The country singer and songwriter, who died on Saturday at 88, tucked enduring aphorisms into tales about facing up to loss.Kris Kristofferson, who was 88 when he died on Saturday, embedded enduring aphorisms into his songs. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” he observed in “Me and Bobby McGee.” In “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” he wrote, “Yesterday is dead and gone/And tomorrow’s out of sight.” And in “For the Good Times,” he urged, “There is no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning.”Those are stoic lines, delivered matter-of-factly, often tucked into tales about facing up to some kind of loss: of a lover, a friend, a hope, a chance, fleeting time. Kristofferson’s characters are often isolated, luckless, drunk or high, but they’re still seeking redemption or at least trying to move on — like Casey, in “Casey’s Last Ride,” who was “seeing his reflection in the lives of all the lonely men/who reach for anything they can to keep from going home.”Kristofferson established himself as a songwriter as the 1970s began, and his early songs were his most lasting ones. His willingness to sing unpretty stories and his homey melodies were foundations for the outlaw country movement of the 1970s. Bob Dylan has said, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”After a detour through 1970s movie stardom, Kristofferson shared the outlaw movement’s victory lap, in the 1980s, when he joined Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the Highwaymen. He went on to write politically charged songs and the homilies of an elder. His voice was serviceable but not striking in his early years, and it grew much gruffer through the decades. But it was always forthright enough to put across the unvarnished substance of his music.Here, in chronological order, are 12 of Kristofferson’s essential songs. Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.‘Me and Bobby McGee’ (1970)Kristofferson’s own version of this tale of hitchhiking, harmonica-playing lovers, from his debut album, is far more wistful and less cathartic than Janis Joplin’s No. 1 hit version, released in 1971 after her death. Where she turned its outro of “la-da-das” into an ecstatic rave-up, Kristofferson lets them trail off, like a memory receding into the distance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88

      by

      Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.Mr. Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:Well, I woke up Sunday morningWith no way to hold my head that didn’t hurtAnd the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t badSo I had one more for dessert.Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.Steeped in a neo-Romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Willie, Waylon and the Boys: the Ultimate Outlaw Country Primer

      by

      Hear songs from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and more, inspired by a new book.In 1985, four icons of outlaw country — from left, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash — formed the supergroup the Highwaymen.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressDear listeners,I’m a sucker for anything remotely related to country music’s outlaw movement, and I recently tore through the audiobook of Brian Fairbanks’s tome “Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever,” an informative page-turner that inspired today’s playlist.Coined in the 1970s to classify a certain kind of country music rebel, the term “outlaw” can be a little nebulous, and there’s endless debate about which artists were (and weren’t) a part of that club.* I appreciated Fairbanks’s decision, though, to focus primarily on the four artists who would form the country supergroup The Highwaymen: Texas’s braided sage Willie Nelson; the deep-voiced, country-rocking maverick Waylon Jennings; the legendary father figure Johnny Cash; and the Rhodes Scholar-turned-Nashville janitor-turned-songwriting superstar Kris Kristofferson.In telling the stories of these four artists and the ways their careers intersected, Fairbanks also traces the larger arc of outlaw country — from its beginnings as a genuinely countercultural movement that flew in the face of the Nashville establishment, to its transformation into an empty marketing term, and its eventual rebirth in subsequent generations of freethinking country artists.It’s difficult to distill the first wave of outlaw country down to just 10 tracks, but for this playlist, I gave it my best shot. You’ll hear songs from the aforementioned four, as well as tunes from Jessi Colter, Billy Joe Shaver and David Allan Coe. And as for those waves of outlaws who have recently revived the spirit of the Highwaymen? Stay tuned for a playlist dedicated to them in the coming weeks.Almost busted in Laredo, but for reasons that I’d rather not disclose,Lindsay*Merle Haggard, for example, is sometimes grouped in with the outlaw movement. While the self-proclaimed Okie from Muskogee was the only one of the above mentioned artists to do significant jail time, there were other aspects of his career and philosophy that put him at odds with artists like Nelson, Cash and Kristofferson. Regardless of how you label him, Haggard is one of the greats — and worthy of a playlist all his own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Billy Edd Wheeler, Songwriter Who Celebrated Rural Life, Dies at 91

      by

      His plain-spoken songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Kenny Rogers and many others. The duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter made his “Jackson” a huge country hit.Billy Edd Wheeler, an Appalachian folk singer who wrote vividly about rural life and culture in songs like “Jackson,” a barn-burning duet that was a hit in 1967 for June Carter and Johnny Cash as well as for Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, died on Monday at his home in Swannanoa, N.C., east of Asheville. He was 91.His death was announced on social media by his daughter, Lucy Wheeler.Plain-spoken and colloquial, Mr. Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by some 200 artists, among them Neil Young, Hank Snow, Elvis Presley, and Florence & the Machine. “Jackson” — a series of spirited exchanges between a quarrelsome husband and wife — opens with one of the most evocative couplets in popular music: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout/We’ve been talkin’ about Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”From there the husband boasts about the carousing he plans to do in Jackson, as his wife scoffs at his hollow braggadocio. “Go on down to Jackson,” she goads him on, emboldened by the song’s neo-rockabilly backbeat. “Go ahead and wreck your health/Go play your hand, you big-talkin’ man, make a big fool of yourself.”Written with the producer and lyricist Jerry Leiber, with whom Mr. Wheeler had apprenticed as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, “Jackson” was a Top 10 country hit for Ms. Carter and Mr. Cash and a Top 20 pop hit for Ms. Sinatra and Mr. Hazlewood. The Carter-Cash version won a Grammy Award in 1968 for best country-and-western performance by a duo, trio or group.The 1967 album “Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter” included Mr. Wheeler’s song “Jackson,” which would reach the country Top 10 as a single and win a Grammy.ColumbiaMr. Wheeler’s original pass at the song, though, was anything but auspicious. In fact, when Mr. Leiber first heard it, he advised Mr. Wheeler to jettison most of what he had written and to use the line “We got married in a fever” in the song’s opening and closing choruses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More