The Bob Dylan Albums Kris Kristofferson Said Changed the Grand Ole Opry Forever

While we often talk about Bob Dylan’s influence on music as a whole, rarely does the conversation ever swing toward country music specifically—unless, of course, you were to ask Kris Kristofferson. According to the “Me and Bobby McGee” singer, he could trace a lyrical, musical, and cultural shift in Nashville’s country music scene directly back to two Bob Dylan records.

The first came in 1966, and the second followed three years later in the spring of 1969. After that, Kristofferson said, Music City, USA, would never be the same again.

Kris Kristofferson Said These Bob Dylan Albums Changed Country Music Forever

Folk and country tend to exist in similar areas of the musical spectrum. Both rely on story-telling, acoustic instrumentation, and Americana imagery of rambling troubadours and blue-collar workers. Bob Dylan has long been a hero of the folk (and later rock ‘n’ roll) scene, but Kris Kristofferson once argued that Dylan did more for country music than most other artists in the mid-to-late 1960s with two releases in particular.

“Our generation owe him our artistic lives, because he opened all the doors in Nashville when he did Blonde on Blonde and Nashville Skyline,” Kristofferson later said, per Rolling Stone. “The country scene was so conservative until he arrived. He brought in a whole new audience. He changed the way people thought about it—even the Grand Ole Opry was never the same again.” And if anyone were to bear witness to the magic Dylan created with these two records, it’d be Kristofferson. After all, he was there to witness it, albeit from the sidelines.

While Dylan was writing and recording Blonde on Blonde in 1966 and Nashville Skyline in 1969, Kristofferson was making ends meet as an aspiring songwriter by working as a janitor at Columbia Records. Not one to overstep his boundaries as an employee of the iconic record label, Kristofferson didn’t push his luck trying to talk to Dylan while he worked. But he kept a close eye on Dylan just the same.

A Songwriter’s Perspective On A Greater Musical Shift

Kris Kristofferson might have been working as a janitor while Bob Dylan was cutting some of his most iconic albums, but it didn’t take long for Kristofferson to join his musical idol among the ranks of the highly respected and famous. As Kristofferson put it in a later interview, he had been writing songs for a long time before he dove into Dylan’s discography. But after he did, his perspective on music changed forever.

“Dylan opened up all the new doors for a different kind of songwriting than what was going on in the ‘50s and the early ‘60s. All of a sudden, you could write like a poet. You could have strange imagery, personal, private imagery that wasn’t usually found in the old songs by the Clovers and the Coasters,” he said.

“Bob Dylan continued to inspire throughout the five years I was going to school there in Nashville, paying my dues more or less, and trying to figure out how to do what it was I wanted to do, Bob Dylan was the man to continually—every record, we waited for it and find out how he was doing it now,” Kristofferson continued. “He was a bigger influence than anybody.”

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