Kris Kristofferson: the free-spirited country music star who studied at Oxford

A hard-drinking singer-songwriter with an outlaw spirit, Kris Kristofferson transformed the country music scene in the 1970s by bringing lyrical sophistication, and a "rarely heard candour and depth", to the genre, said The Irish Times.

His songs were "steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility", and explored "freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light". He recorded them all himself; but his vocals were raspy, and many were bigger hits when covered by other artists – from Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Gladys Knight to the Grateful Dead and Michael Bublé. Notably, he wrote "Me and Bobby McGee", with its resonant refrain "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose/ Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon if it ain't free", which became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Janis Joplin (with whom he had a brief affair). 

Charismatic and ruggedly good looking, Kristofferson then fell into acting. He was Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and the washed-up musician, opposite Barbra Streisand, in the 1976 version of "A Star Is Born"; but any hopes he had of becoming a leading man were dashed by his involvement in the career-tarnishing mega-flop "Heaven's Gate" (1980).

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With his unkempt beard and habit of keeping a bottle of whisky tucked into his boots, he lived the life of a musical vagabond, said The Daily Telegraph. Yet there was little in his background to suggest that career. 

Emptying ashtrays

Born in Texas in 1936, he was the son of a major general in the US air force, and was expected to follow suit. In high school, he excelled academically and at sport. He played rugby and American football at college before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he earned a boxing Blue, wrote his thesis on William Blake, and made a fruitless attempt to launch a pop career. 

Returning to the US, he married his first wife, Frances Beer, in 1961, and enlisted in the US air force, where he became a helicopter pilot. But in 1965, he turned down a post at the West Point Academy to try his luck as a songwriter in Nashville. This came as a blow to his wife, and precipitated their divorce; and proved the last straw for his parents, who disowned him. "Not many cats I knew bailed out like I did," he reflected in 1970. He'd been surprised by his parents' reaction: they'd known he wanted to be a writer. There again, he said, "I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweeds with a pipe." Struggling to sell his songs, he found work as a janitor at Columbia Recording Studios, where he recalled emptying ashtrays and wastepaper baskets as Bob Dylan recorded "Blonde on Blonde".

Pilot to star

When his second child needed expensive medical treatment, he started flying helicopters again, for the oil industry. Legend has it that, in desperation, he landed one in Johnny Cash's back garden, and handed him a tape of his music. Cash was impressed, recorded one of his songs, and invited him to perform with him and his wife June Carter Cash at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, which kickstarted his career. Back in Nashville, he married the singer Rita Coolidge, with whom he recorded three duet albums, and teamed up with other songwriters including Willie Nelson. It was an exciting, creative period, he said – "kind of our Paris in the 1920s". He and Coolidge divorced in 1980. He was a great man but a rotten husband, she said. Around that time, he quit drinking, fearing that he was heading the same way as the whisky-sodden musician he'd played in "A Star Is Born".

From the 1980s, he used his music to promote left-wing causes; and in 1992, he famously defended Sinéad O'Connor, after she caused uproar by tearing up a photograph of the Pope to protest against clerical sex abuse. "Maybe she's crazy, maybe she ain't," he wrote in his song "Sister Sinéad", "but so was Picasso, and so were the saints." By then, he was mainly performing with The Highwaymen, a country supergroup that he'd formed with his friends and fellow Nashville veterans Cash, Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He is survived by his third wife, Lisa, to whom he was married for the final 40 years of his life, and his eight children.