Why Kris Kristofferson wrote his biggest hit “on assignment”
Part of the genius of Kris Kristofferson‘s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was that anyone could sing it. With its central travel narrative, the titular companion has a purposefully ambiguous name. Depending on who was performing the track, the subject could be a girl, a boy, or anything in between. Bobby McGee doesn’t do anything specifically gendered: they’re a person wearing faded jeans and singing the blues. That could be anybody.
Kristofferson wasn’t a famous country star when he first conceived the song. Instead, he was working odd jobs, one of which was sweeping floors at Columbia Records’ Nashville studio. It was only after Johnny Cash agreed to record one of his songs that Kristofferson’s career took off. After signing with the publisher Combine Music, the boss of the organisation tasked Kristofferson with an idea.
“I had just gone to work for Combine Music. Fred Foster, the owner, called me and said, ‘I’ve got a title for you: ‘Me and Bobbie McKee,’ and I thought he said ‘McGee,'” Kristofferson recalled, later included in the book Twang – The Ultimate Book of Country Music Quotations. “I thought there was no way I could ever write that, and it took me months hiding from him because I can’t write on assignment. But it must have stuck in the back of my head. One day, I was driving between Morgan City and New Orleans. It was raining, and the windshield wipers were going. I took an old experience with another girl in another country. I had it finished by the time I got to Nashville.”
“I hid from Fred for a while, but I was trying to write that song all the time I was flying around Baton Rouge and New Orleans,” Kristofferson later explained to Mojo. “I had the rhythm of a Mickey Newbury song going in the back of my mind, ‘Why You Been Gone So Long,’ and I developed this story of these guys who went around the country kind of like Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina in (Fellini’s) La Strada. At one point, like he did, he drove off and left her there. That was ‘Somewhere near Salinas, I let her slip away.'”
“Later in the film, he (Quinn) hears a woman hanging out her clothes, singing the melody she (Masina) used to play on the trombone, and she tells him, ‘Oh, she died.’ So he goes out, gets drunk, gets into a fight in a bar and ends up on the beach, howling at the stars,” Kristofferson said. “And that was where ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’ came from because he was free from her, and I guess he would have traded all his tomorrows for another day with her.”
It was on that fateful trip between Morgan City and New Orleans that one of the song’s final lines came to Kristofferson. “I went, ‘With them windshield wipers slapping time and Bobby clapping hands, we finally sang up every song the driver knew,'” he recalled. “And that was it.”
Foster’s suggestion mainly revolved around the title character and how the twist would be that she’s a girl. That was enough to grant Foster a songwriting credit. But the ambiguity allowed anyone to take on the ode to Bobby McGee, whether it was Roger Miller’s hit country version or the brief time it spent in the live catalogue of the Grateful Dead. But the most popular version would eventually be recorded by Janis Joplin, who had a posthumous number one hit with the song in 1971.
“Her producer gave me the record, and it was pretty hard to listen to,” Kristofferson later told Rolling Stone. “I was listening to it at my publisher’s office where we used to hang out; there was nobody there, and I was playing it over and over again just so I could hear it without breaking up.”
For Kristofferson, the song would forever belong to Joplin. “‘Bobby McGee’ was the song that made the difference for me,” he told Performing Songwriter in 2015. “Every time I sing it, I still think of Janis.”
Check out Joplin’s version of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ down below.
