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## Cash and Kristofferson
One of the more consequential outcomes of Cash’s career revival in the late 1960s was his role in championing Kris Kristofferson, who would become one of the most important songwriter-performers of the following decade.
Kristofferson had a background that was, on paper, entirely different from Cash’s: a Rhodes Scholar who had served as an Army helicopter pilot before moving to Nashville in 1966 to pursue a songwriting career. He worked as a janitor at Columbia Recording Studios in Nashville while trying to get his songs heard. Cash was one of the people whose attention he sought.
The story of how Kristofferson got Cash to hear “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” — landing a helicopter on Cash’s lawn, in the most dramatic version of the anecdote — is likely apocryphal, or at least embellished. What is documented is that Cash recorded the song in 1970, performed it on The Johnny Cash Show, and it won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year award in 1970. Kristofferson’s career as a recording artist and an actor followed from that recognition.
Cash’s willingness to champion Kristofferson was of a piece with his television show’s willingness to present Dylan, Seeger, and others: it reflected a view of country music’s relationship to the broader American songwriting tradition that Nashville’s mainstream did not share in the late 1960s. The commercial platform that the Folsom album had provided made it possible for Cash to exercise that aesthetic judgment in public and influential ways.
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## The Last Shows and What Endures