Kristofferson staggered into the spotlight just as country music was hitting the airwaves and igniting the national imagination. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the genre experienced a nationwide surge in popularity, presence, and profits. Record sales soared as more country tunes crossed over onto the pop charts with great success. The number of radio stations playing exclusively country skyrocketed from eighty-one in 1961 to 650 by 1970, with the Northeast capitulating, as one New York Times writer characterized it, “to the sound that has swept most of the rest of the country.” Rolling Stone printed feature-length articles on the music coming out of Nashville and country stars appeared on the covers of Time, Look, and Newsweek. This national ascendancy of what many considered a particularly southern form of musical expression prompted a fair amount of soul-searching as well as some navel-gazing. Numerous singers, songwriters, journalists, music critics, producers, pundits, and historians chimed in, offering their opinions on what this trend revealed about the nation, the region, and the genre.
Kristofferson factored into these social, political, and cultural developments in familiar and unfamiliar ways. In a time marked by an obsession with the “far-ranging, fast spreading revolt of the little man against the Establishment,” country music’s focus on the lives of average, everyday men and women drew a great deal of attention. Jefferson Cowie describes the genre as “embattled terrain in the class wars of the 1970s,” with many listeners tuning in in hopes of gauging the cultural and political pulse of white working- and middle-class Americans. Music scholars and journalists alike have held that country music fomented or at least exemplified societal divisions, and Haggard’s “Okie” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” seen as “ballads of the silent majority,” solidified this reputation.
A look at Kristofferson’s rise to stardom reveals that, at a moment when Americans were deeply divided, many looked to him and his Nashville peers as artists who might bridge these divides. His appeal highlights a central but often overlooked component of country music’s attraction. In a search for what they considered real, honest lives and experiences, many Americans of varied regional, economic, and ideological backgrounds latched onto country music’s apparent authenticity—a tortured and malleable concept in its own right—as an antidote to materialism, estrangement, and polarization. Kristofferson and country music promised their listeners—young and old, liberal and conservative—a “politics of recognition and status” that ran counter to that being offered by the likes of George Wallace and Richard Nixon. For Kristofferson, this appeal proved potent but short-lived. The highs and lows of his early career revealed that, amid a lot of chatter about newness, country music remained tethered to certain preconceptions limiting the power and possibilities of its appeal.