Fan Pix & Vids

4 thoughts on “Fan Pix & Vids”

1. I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Kris, but I wire his records out and songwriting became my passion, and is to this day. I never made a living at it , but I’m o k with that. This is a song I wrote after reading and article on old people in care homes suffering mentally because they couldn’t have visitors during the pandemic. I fell asleep while reading the article and woke up, so g 90% written. I’m not implying tha song it’s anything like Kris’s songs. I just hope you can tell how munch he has Infiltrated me as a songwriter.

   https://youtu.be/6bRqTz3eW7w

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   1. Hi Richard, Kris still has a group of extremely dedicated & very appreciate fans. We have a group on Facebook
      https://www.facebook.com/groups/434278836778276
      …& host a #TalentTuesday session every week where any member can post something of their own work, whether it be musical or otherwise. I’ll share your song this week if I remember! I’ve added it to my listening playlist for later, too. Always lovely to hear from a fan – Compliments of the season & all the very best to you & yours for 2022. Regards, Donna

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2. Dear Mr. Kristofferson. I’m one of a group of song-writers that help each other trying to get better. I am coming to it from a little different perspective. Though I’m not writing formal stanzas, I do see my lines in terms of metrical feet. I was trying to be helpful with another fellow’s lyrics, and told him he had a trochee where it was gonna be difficult. There were about twenty or so song-writers, some with a long track-record as professions, participating in the discussion. I think somewhere around the 1960’s and 1970’s those approaches got left behind. I don’t mean common meter stanzas. I just mean seeing the drum-beat of rhythm in a line and measuring it the old. People don’t seem to see lines the way I learned from poetry class a long time ago. It’s not the song-writers today decided. Most have no idea how any of this stuff works.

   I don’t think it’s a straight jacket. For my part, I believe that the basic vocabulary of iamb, trochee, anapest etc gives a person efficacy over how their lyrics work. I don’t want to screw up with what’s working for people, though, and they come up with lines Alexander Pope would be pleased about, but if you know how to see it that way, maybe it makes it harder to come up with, so sometimes I feel like I’m being held up with wires looking at other people levitating.

   Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you how beautiful your songs are. I’m writing because I’ve made the claim that before the 60’s or 70’s, rules of meter were common knowledge. Maybe not to the level of knowing you can put a trochee in the 2nd foot of a pentameter line if the last two feet are spondees, but people would at least know what I’m saying. Is this correct? I’m not looking for the secret recipe or anything. It’s important to me to understand a appreciate, basically, and help me develop. When song-writers got together in the 1960’s and 70’s, would it have seemed out of the blue to congratulate someone’s elegant anapest or what-not. I think maybe something has happened in song-writing similar to how TS Elliot understood metrical feet, but not someone trying to imitate TS Elliot. I’m not a pro, but some of these people I know have their stake in song-writing. If this is interesting to you and you have anything to say about it, it would sure make me a big hit to pass on anything at all. I’d just put it in the General Discussion forum at a subscription site for song-writers. So this is just a I’ll write Kris Kristofferson a fan letter and ask him! Thirty years ago I had to read a lot of poetry on a schedule and write about it. I liked to do scansions and write about those because it seemed practical for learning how to make poetry and songs and got me the professors’ good graces. I think real prosody in song-writing has a lot to it, and it’s very individual, but the individual artist wants to try to understand the method of the masters, so I am asking for your recollection or perception of song-writers applying the traditional understanding of metrical feet to measure their lines, whether in regular stanzas or not, back in the 1960’s and 70’s. I am also very curious how you think it may have been for writers of Hank Williams’ generation. I think there was a middle school teacher in Alabama who taught him common meter, which she knew from hymns, because who knows what he was coming up with. It could have been women that gave all those old guys the knowledge of song-writing in the depression, when they had them in the school-house, and they themselves understood how ballad lyrics were structured from being a combination school teacher and playing piano on Sunday. This is the only way to picture how Hank Williams could have the formal knowledge to write I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry which would have made Coleridge cry if he had written it himself.

   I hope these questions are interesting for you to think about, that they reach you, but it’s basically a fan letter to you, so it’s okay if you are anybody else down there just reads it and moves on. I hope a few questions about prosody in song-writing might be enjoyable and interesting to respond about, and it would be wonderful for me, like winning the lottery for our little song-writing group online. The way it is with any fan letter is that it’s a message in a bottle. I didn’t send a gift basket. Here it is, anyway.

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   1. Hi John, a great letter – I can’t guarantee that Kris will read it, but I can run it by some of his peers & see if they anything to say. Watch this space! Best regards, Donna

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