One of the songs Johnny Cash would turn into a No. 1 hit was actually written by someone working behind the scenes at Columbia Records — and that someone was none other than Kris Kristofferson.
Before he became one of country music’s most celebrated singer-songwriters, Kristofferson was working as a janitor at the record label, trying to get his own songs heard. In 1969, he penned the future country music standard “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which would end up changing the course of his career.
As reported by Wide Open Country, Kristofferson had befriended Cash’s wife, June Carter, and would give her demo tapes to bring home to Cash — though he eventually thought he might need to take more drastic measures in order to get Cash to listen to the tapes.
Kristofferson, who was also working as a part-time helicopter pilot for the Army Reserve, decided to land a chopper on Cash’s lawn at his Tennessee home to hand-deliver the tape to the Man in Black.
“As I approached, out stepped Kris Kristofferson, with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other,” Cash recalled, according to Wide Open Country. “I stopped, dumbfounded. He grabbed my hand, put the tape in it, grinned and got back into the helicopter and was gone, a bit wobbly, but almost straight up, then out high above the lake where all his songs lay on the bottom. He disappeared through the clouds. I looked at the tape of ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ and ‘Me And Bobby McGee.'”
Kristofferson said things didn’t exactly go down that way. “Y’know, John had a very creative imagination,” he told UnCut in 2009. “I’ve never flown with a beer in my life. Believe me, you need two hands to fly those things.”
But regardless of how the story really started, it was what came next that would turn the song into a massive hit. In September 1970, Cash performed “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on his eponymous television show, and later included his version of the song on his companion album for The Johnny Cash Show. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart by October 1970, and occupied the top spot for two weeks.
It was even crowned as the CMA Song of the Year in 1970, with the award going to Kristofferson for his masterful songwriting.
Related: 1969 Rock Staple, Written During the Vietnam War, Is Still One of the ‘Top American Rock Songs’ Ever
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