Kris Kristofferson's Political Views had Long Been a Key Part of Who He Was

Following the news that Kris Kristofferson had died at the age of 88, many are looking back on the legacy of the actor and country singer. Kris was widely known as a rebel within the world of country music, but many are now looking back on his political views.

For most of the second half of his life, Kris was outspoken on questions of politics. Here's what we know about where he stood politically and what he said about a variety of issues.

Kris's political views tended to lean to the left, and that became especially clear in the 1980s. His albums released at that time had pretty explicit political leanings, including a song called "They Killed Him" about his heroes, which included people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

He was also unafraid of taking a stance that might have been viewed as unpopular.

Just weeks after Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on live television, he introduced her at a Madison Square Garden performance paying tribute to Bob Dylan. She was booed and heckled by the audience, and Kris was told to get her off the stage. Instead, he gave her some encouragement.

“I went out and I said, ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down,’ and she said ‘I’m not down,’ and she sang. It was very courageous. It just seemed to me wrong," he said during an interview in 2010.

Kris elaborated on the ways politics had inflected his music even further in the 2005 book Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music.

"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," he explained. "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."

“Everything is political. It just sounds worse if you call it political. I mean, we’re talking about life and death and the things that matter," he added.

His first hit, though, was actually a critique of those who were protesting the Vietnam War called "Talkin' Vietnam Blues." The song was written just after Kris had finished his own tour during the war.

“It wasn’t pro-war so much as it was pro-soldier,” he said. “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… Within about two or three years, I’d gone about 180 degrees, thinking that the war was wrong.”

Kris continued to perform right up through the 2020 pandemic, and he even once had a feud with right-wing singer Toby Keith over their political views. It's unclear how his views evolved as his age, but during his hey-day, he was certainly left leaning.