On a Sunday night in January 2013, Kris Kristofferson stood in a small Nashville room and gave away an award with his own name and face on it. He had been allowed to choose who would receive it first. He chose Willie Nelson, the songwriter he and his friends had looked up to back when Willie was still a name only other writers seemed to know.
“It Has to Be Willie”
The Nashville Songwriters Association International had just created a new lifetime achievement honor and named it the Kris Kristofferson Award. It made sense. Kris was one of the organization’s 42 founding members, and generations of Nashville writers had grown up studying his songs. The board planned to give the award only when it felt someone truly deserved it, to songwriters and artists from any genre.
When board members asked Kris who should be first, he did not offer a list.
“It has to be Willie. His music has touched the world.”
A Sunday Night at the Bluebird
The presentation took place on January 27, 2013, at the Bluebird Cafe, the tiny room famous for letting songwriters be heard up close. It was a private, invitation-only evening. NSAI board members and old friends of both men filled the seats. Jamey Johnson watched from a corner. Fred Foster, the producer who shares the writing credit on “Me and Bobby McGee,” sat at a table right beside the stage.
Kris was 76 that night. Willie was 79. Both were already in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and between them they had written songs that most people in that room could sing from memory.
What Kris Told the Room
Kris did not pretend to be comfortable with the honor. He told Willie he was proud to give it to him, then admitted he was embarrassed that his own face and name were on the thing.
Then he took the crowd back to 1965, the year he arrived in Nashville after leaving the Army. He remembered the town as the most exciting place a creative person could be. The writers he spent his time with were serious about the work and generous with each other, he said, and they all had the same hero. It was not a star on the radio. It was a man most of the country had never heard of yet: Willie Nelson.
Kris went further than that. According to the Tennessean, he told the room that whenever he tried to picture what God might look like, the image always comes out looking like Willie.
Willie returned the favor. He reminded everyone that Kris had first caught on in the coffeehouses with the young hippie crowd, at a time when a lot of the country did not quite know what to make of him.
One Song From Each of Them
Then the two old friends picked up guitars for a short acoustic set that nobody had rehearsed. They harmonized on Willie’s “Crazy,” the song Patsy Cline made famous, and on Kris’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Kris summed up their friendship simply that week: they rarely saw each other anymore, but every time they got together, something special happened.
“Next Time”
After the music, the two men invited reporters onto Willie’s tour bus, and the stories kept coming. Kris told the one about Willie visiting him on the set of the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where Kris’s co-star Bob Dylan talked Willie into playing a solo concert right there.
Somewhere in that conversation, Willie admitted he had shown up that night with a different idea. He honestly thought he had come to give Kris an award. He had even worked up a speech.
“I had a great speech. Next time.”
Six Years Later
Next time came in November 2019. The Country Music Association had created its own lifetime achievement honor in 2012 and named it after Willie Nelson, giving the first one to Willie himself. On November 13, 2019, the CMA gave the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award to Kris Kristofferson.
Kris, then 83, did not come to Nashville to collect it. He was playing a show in Iowa that night. Back at Bridgestone Arena, Dierks Bentley, Sheryl Crow, Chris Janson, John Osborne and Joe Walsh played “Me and Bobby McGee” in his honor while he was out on the road doing what he had always done.
Kris Kristofferson died in September 2024 at 88. The first award with his name on it went to Willie. The award with Willie’s name on it went to him.
Do you remember the first time you heard Willie and Kris sing together?