The song was “Good Morning John.” Kris Kristofferson wrote it because June Carter asked him to, for a small dinner she was giving after Johnny Cash came home from rehab. Kris had already written songs that played on radios all over the world. This one had an audience of one man, sitting a few feet away, and Kris later admitted the request “scared me to death.”
A small dinner and a big request
Kris described the evening in a later interview. June was having a small dinner for John after he got out of what Kris believed was his last rehab. Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter were there, along with some of their family.
It was not meant to be a show. As Kris told Billboard, everyone at the gathering was supposed to say something inspirational to John. Most people would have brought a few kind words. June asked Kris for a song.
That was harder than it sounds. Kris always said he could only write what he felt, and he had never been good at writing songs on order for other singers. Now he had to put his feelings about a friend’s addiction into a song and then sing it to that friend’s face.
Why Johnny Cash mattered so much to Kris
Johnny Cash was more than a friend. When Kris was still an unknown songwriter in Nashville, Cash put him on his show at the Newport Folk Festival. Kris called it the first thing he ever did as a performer, and after it the offers started coming. Cash went on to take Kris’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” to No. 1.
So the man Kris was being asked to sing to was the man who had opened the door for him.
Singing it across the table
Kris wrote the song and sang it to Johnny at the gathering. It was not a gentle pat on the back. The song is addressed straight to John, and it talks openly about how close Kris had feared he came to losing him, and about staying his friend no matter what.
Kris did not remember it as a triumphant moment. He said he thought Johnny was probably just as embarrassed as he was.
Years later, an interviewer called the song a bit brutal and asked whether Johnny ever reacted to it. Kris said Johnny never complained about it, because it was the truth, and Johnny was fighting that battle all the way to the end.
The line that made Willie Nelson crack up
The song had a second, funnier life in a recording studio. Kris tried to record it with Willie Nelson and his band singing the background. The plan was for them to echo him: each time Kris sang “Good morning, John,” they sang it back.
That worked until Kris reached the line where he tells John he loves him. Willie did not echo it word for word. As Kris told Billboard:
“Willie said ‘He loves you, John’ and we all cracked up laughing.”
That session never got finished. Kris said he finished the song on his own later.
Waylon recorded it first
One of the people at that dinner table ended up putting the song on record. Waylon Jennings included “Good Morning John” on his 1985 album Turn the Page, a record made during his own new chapter after quitting drugs.
Kris held on to it much longer. In 2009 he finally recorded it for his album Closer to the Bone, produced by Don Was. Johnny Cash had died in 2003. Kris explained that there were songs like “Good Morning John” that he had never recorded but that really meant something to him, and he wanted to get as many of them as he could onto that album.
When did it happen?
The exact year is not as clear as the story itself. Some song histories place the dinner in the 1970s. Kris tied it to the rehab he believed was Johnny’s last, after which, in his words, Johnny straightened up. Johnny’s best-known treatment came at the Betty Ford Center in 1983, and Waylon’s recording shows the song existed by 1985. What every account agrees on is the heart of it: June asked, Kris was terrified, and he sang it anyway.
Kris Kristofferson died in September 2024 at 88. His recording of the song he once sang to Johnny Cash across a dinner table is still there on Closer to the Bone.