Kris Kristofferson Was a Janitor When He Wrote the Iconic Song “That Allowed Him To Quit Working for a Living”

There’s plenty of glitz and glam surrounding the music industry’s biggest hits, but when Kris Kristofferson got his big break, his life as a janitor was less “glitz and glam” and more “garbage and sanitation.” In hindsight, Kristofferson’s iconic song was a natural consequence of a tiring, blue-collar life marked by a heavy reliance on drugs and alcohol to get through the day.

Nevertheless, to imagine Kristofferson working as a janitor when he wrote the song he would later say “allowed him to quit working for a living” is one of countless examples of the singer-songwriter’s rambling, inventive, and wholly unique life path.

Kris Kristofferson Worked As A Janitor When He Wrote This Song

Before Kris Kristofferson became the rugged charmer of music and film we know and love today, he was a Rhodes scholar with a Master’s degree from Oxford University and a U.S. Army Captain who worked various odd jobs to make ends meet while he pursued his real dream: songwriting. One such job was as a commercial helicopter pilot working for oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico, which he was doing when he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.”

But when Kristofferson wrote “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” a song that would yank him from the pool of struggling, unknown songwriters into a bona fide industry celebrity, he was working as a janitor for Columbia Recording Studios. Perhaps even more notably, Kristofferson took on this less-than-glamorous gig after turning down an offer to be a professor at West Point.

Ray Stevens was the first artist to cut a version of Kristofferson’s 1969 track. Kristofferson later said, “Nobody had ever put that much money and effort into recording one of my songs. I remember the first time I heard it, he’s a wonderful singer, I had to leave the publishing house, and I just sat on the steps and wept because it was such a beautiful thing” (via Far Out Magazine).

Beautiful as it might have been, the song gained its most significant fame from Johnny Cash’s version, which the Man in Black put out the following year as part of a Johnny Cash Show compilation. “I’m just real grateful for that song because it opened up a whole lot of doors for me,” Kristofferson said in a 2013 NPR interview. “So many people that I admired, admired it. Actually, it was the song that allowed me to quit working for a living.”

The Perks Of Being A Columbia Recording Studios Custodian

A janitor position might sound like a shockingly stark contrast to Kris Kristofferson’s many future successes, but his time sweeping floors at Columbia Recording Studios paid off in more ways than one. During an interview at the 2009 BMI Country Awards, Kristofferson said he was thankful for his custodial job “because I wasn’t making any money on my songs. But it exposed me to a lot of music in the couple of years that I was there as a janitor at Columbia. It was about four years before anybody cut a song.”

Kristofferson’s time at Columbia also helped spark a special relationship with Johnny Cash. Years before Cash cut his own version of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” Kristofferson met Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, and gave her a demo to give to her husband. Although nothing came of it for quite a while, Kristofferson eventually began hanging out during Cash’s recording sessions at Columbia. But one day, when a group of songwriters crashed Cash’s studio time, a secretary blamed the intrusion on Kristofferson. Suddenly, his job was on the line. He avoided Cash to prevent more trouble.

In the 2015 documentary Johnny Cash: American Rebel, Kristofferson recalled Cash finding him in the studio vault doing busy work. “He said, ‘I understand you’re not coming to the session.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve got a lot of work to do down here. I can’t.’ He said, ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you I’m not gonna record until you come up there.’” Kristofferson said the moment showed “the measure of the man. [Cash] always stood up for the underdog.”

Photo by Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images