In the 2005 book “Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music,” Kristofferson said, “When I first started performing, it was in rock ‘n’ roll folk clubs like the Bitter End and the Troubadour. But eventually I was working in places whee I was getting a mostly country audience. I just felt it was my duty to tell the truth as I saw it, and in some places it didn’t go over very well. I can remember one time down in Atlanta — which I had always considered a friendly town because they had made such a big hit out of ‘Why Me,’ being the first ones to start playing that on the radio — about 300 people asked for their money back at a show I did. I was talking about Oliver North and the contras and what we were doing around the world.
“I remember Jackson Browne telling me years ago, ‘Listen, man, you’re taking a lot more chances than we are, because your audience is so much more conservative’,” he continued. “And that may be true. I guess I first started speaking out more in the ’80s or at the end of the ’70s. But I have a much more receptive audience today, because I think more people have had the experience that I had — they love their country and want to believe in it, but it’s hard to accept that we’re doing those people in Iraq any good.”
Ironically, perhaps, his first hit as a songwriter was with a top 20 country hit by Dave Dudley in 1966 that had lyrics knocking Vietnam protesters: “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues,” penned by a Colonel Kris Kristofferson, fresh out of the Army. “It wasn’t pro-war so much as it was pro-soldier,” he said in the book, “because I was still in the Army when I wrote it. Up until that time, all the information I got was from the Stars and Stripes, and it was a slow process of me changing my ideas…
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