“Hyper-literate hillbilly,” is how Steve Earle described Kris Kristofferson, who could be seen by many to be a contradiction in terms. A man of many facets, which many would see as mutually exclusive. A country singer, as well as a Rhodes scholar with a degree in English Literature; influences from Hank Williams, and William Blake; as well as being a singer who, many argue, can’t actually sing; an international performer and an introvert.

To think in such terms is to be guilty of that most odious of habits, music snobbery, which surrounds this particular art form in the manner that a fart fills a spacesuit.

Kristofferson has shared the view that his voice does not match the level of his peers, such as Johnny Cash, whom those with a technical knowledge would accept as good. As he said himself when it was first suggested he launch a career as a singer: “I sound like a frog.”

Yet his songs when Elvis covered ‘Help me make it through the night’ and ‘For the Good Times’, they were audibly pleasing but even Presley’s powerful baritone could not tell the story behind them which Kristofferson was plainly living at the time of writing. There is a depth to his voice that has been weathered by time and whiskey and well as his life has been by love and heartbreak.

Kris Kristofferson and the Strangers, Live at the Marquee, Cork, June 2019 (Image: Fionnbharr Rodgers)

He has that essential skill of the poet in knowing how to read with feeling, rather than merely recite from memory.

This is what country music aspires to do, when it is done at its very best. It communicates ideas most profound, like love and longing, in a way that does not simplify nor amplify, but comes from a place “closer to the bone,” as Kristofferson wrote, where “everything is sweeter.”

The ‘hillbilly’ stereotype country music is one that prevails, kept ticking by the images which are conjured by Stetson-clad, plaid-flannel-wearing, cheese-eating yokels signing about the Second Amendment rights that no Democratic legislator will take from their cold, dead imaginations. In some ways, this is a pushback against the traditional in favour of the avant-garde. In other ways it pure class-based snobbery.

“Love loves to love love,” wrote James Joyce in Ulysses, and that is reflected in Kristofferson’s album Closer to the Bone (2009). Every track of it, an ovation to the different form of love, rather than solely romantic love, which is the kind over-represented throughout the anthropocene.

The second title of the album, sung in Cork, is titled From Here to Forever and Kristofferson introduces it by saying “here’s one I wrote for my kids,” moving into a treatise on paternal love.

The album finishes with a song called ‘I hate your ugly face’, the first he ever wrote, at the age of 11. This comes immediately after the lyrics, “I swear to be thankful the rest of my days | and worthy whatever I do | For the chance I was given to live and believe | In the love and the wonder of you.”

That’s a juxtaposition you can’t help but appreciate.