Two thirds of the students were out of the Chicago metro area, like me. The rest, 300 miles and a century or two away, were locals.  In the late 1970's, Southern Illinois University was the least attractive state school if your interest was academic. It was the most desirable if your interests were social.

     The area surrounding Carbondale resembles Kentucky and Missouri more than  the flat farming center of the state or the steely, concrete Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, which dominates the state's northern third.

     Many "Salukis" never returned from the idyllic hills, much to the chagrin of their parents, who had assumed when they wrote those tuition checks that they were grooming bankers or teachers rather than backwoods furniture rehabbers who though they could make it writing songs like Kris Kristofferson.

     They would have understood if they ever attended one of Gus' pig roasts. Gus lived outside Murphysboro, which is outside Carbondale, which is to say Gus lived in the woods. Visits to Gus' place were never brief because, really, there was no earthly reason to leave. Many didn't. Gus and his girlfriend would have to wheelbarrow someone to the end of the quarter-mile drive after noticing the guest had been there over a week, but these folk seemed to take to the hills, rather than return to school, fashioning Sling Blade shacks in the woods, and returning to Gus' when alerted to a jamboree signaled by the smell of roasting pig flesh and the sounds of acoustic guitars plunked by guys trying to sound like Kristofferson or Willie Nelson or John Prine or Steve Goodman.

      These backwoods bacchanalia featured half dozen or more guitar strumming entertainers of varying talent who had shed their teen-aged dreams of being the next Eric Clapton or Jimmy Hendrix to pursue more accessible country-western, or folk sounds. It was friendly music, everybody- join-in music. At its heart were words and stories, rather than instrumental virtuosity.

     The best of these songwriters made it sound easy. Anyone, it seemed, could do it, anyone who knew a few chords and had spent a lonely night in a bar with sawdust on its floor. No one was more guilty of creating this illusion that Kris Kristofferson. Few would accuse him of being a great singer, though his voice was distinctive. His guitar and harmonica accompaniment to his songs was minimal. His songs sounded like someone sitting next to you telling a story, and they began strumming as an afterthought. Yet when it comes to songwriting, Kris Kristofferson walks with the immortals.

     Everyone wanted his songs in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Janice Joplin, Charlie Rich, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan and Roger Miller being just a few. He initially struggled trying to sell his own performance of his compositions. Willie Nelson released an album covering Kristofferson songs and had a hit. His greatest musical fame came much later,  in the mid 1980s, touring with Nelson, Cash and Waylon Jennings as The Highwayman

     I saw a little bit of his success and failure in the Genesee Theater Friday night in Waukegan, Ill. The performance was ragged. He was hampered by a cold and thanked a few thousand (well-below capacity) of his admirers for coming out in eight degrees on a January night, "to watch an old man blow his nose." Even at its best, Kristofferson's voice reeks of too many cigarettes. His legacy is that his tunes usually fit more fruitfully into the pipes of others.

     Crowds this size may not cover the expense of a band, which would have helped. His guitar merely provides a tempo for his words, and when he went to harmonica break, he frequently missed the thing altogether, as if he had never used a rack to allow him to strum and blow at the same time.

     "My lips can't reach this goddamn thing, so just pretend there was a real nice harmonica solo there."

     Which left, quite literally, nothing on that stage but the songs themselves, words and phrases naked and unadorned. We saw again the seeming simplicity that made Gus' friends believe they, too, could write like this. No one ever did. 

     The pilgrim 

     He's a pilgrim and a preacher

     and a problem when he's stoned

    A walking contradiction,

    partly truth, partly fiction,

     takin' every wrong direction

     on that lonely road back home.

      For the good times

      ...and make believe you love me, one more time.

      Best of all possible worlds

     I woke up next morning feeling like my head was gone 

     Like my thick old tongue been licking something sick and wrong

     Me and Bobby McGee  

      ...feeling nearly faded as my jeans

     The silver-tongued devil 

     As I was searching,  from bottle to bottle

     for something unfoolish to say 

     the silver-tongued devil just slipped

     from the shadows, 

     and smilingly stole her away.

     Sunday morning, coming down 

     I woke up Sunday morning,

     no way to hold my head

     that didn't hurt,

     and the beer I had for

     breakfast wasn't bad, so

     I had one more for dessert. 

         It was always the words with Kris, the stories that could be growled through the smoke of roasting pig flesh in the Southern Illinois woods, or into the perfect acoustics of the Genesee Theater. An old master. A great storyteller. A songwriter's songwriter.