Doctor's Orders - Kris Kristofferson "Sunday Morning Comin' Down"

We're proud to present the very first guest-written post on Merry Picnic.  The good Doctor Bendel has graced us with his talents and extensive music background, in a new feature we'll be running under the moniker Doctor's Orders.  Check it out, and hopefully we'll have him back soon.

We’ve all heard Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee”, Elvis Presley’s “Help Me Make It through the Night", Roger Miller’s “Best of All Possible Worlds”, or maybe, for the real classicists, even Johnny Cash’s #1 hit country single “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down”. Few, however, can name the mind who generated so many of these songs that have shaped American country and folk rock since the early 1970s, and even fewer have had the privilege to hear these songs as performed by the man himself, Kris Kristofferson.

“Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” was one of Kristofferson’s first real hits, first popularized, before Johnny Cash, by country great Ray Stevens, at a time when Kristofferson’s own albums were largely overlooked and undersold. Kristofferson, who began his songwriting career while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, returned to the United States in 1960 to become a decorated Army Ranger, only to turn down a professorial appointment at West Point and end his Army career so he could focus on his songwriting, a move which would thrust him and his young family into poverty. It was during this time, while working as a janitor in Nashville, that Kristofferson wrote some of the best songs of his career, including “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down”. In this track you can really feel Kristofferson in his place and time: The self-pity and the valor, the dirtiness and loneliness you’d feel at a church or by a family in the park, the smell of booze in your sweat, the eyes burning with decades of bar smoke, the shudder of the whiskey going down, and Kristofferson brushing it all off. We all know the vapid hollowness of our hung-over Sunday mornings, feeling much like the condensation on a warming beer can; but they are those empty Sunday mornings, those that propel us so hopelessly into each week of tedium, that, like “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down”, invisibly define more of our lives than many would care or bother to appreciate.