Another star is gone.

A musical icon from the 60s has died….this time it is one of my favorites….Kris Kristofferson.

Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died, reports the AP. Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said. He was 88. McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given. Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas, native wrote such classics standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine, and Tom T. Hall. “There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”

As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas. He was a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England and turned down an appointment to teach at the US Military Academy at West Point to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal “Blonde on Blonde” double album.

His music will live on but he will be missed.

In closing I leave you with a couple of my favorite songs …..

This one is from the American Outlaws, The Highwaymen tour with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings….

Great music for the soul of us old farts….thank you Kris!

May he rest in peace.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”