“Sunday Morning Coming Down” by JOHNNY CASH

An existential hangover, an Army helicopter, and The Man In Black

Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday

The janitor who swept up around Columbia Records’ Nashville studios walked out of the cockpit of the helicopter that had landed on Johnny Cash’s lawn with a beer in one hand and a demo tape on the other. At least that’s how Cash described it. Kris Kristofferson — Oxford Scholar, Army Ranger, Golden Gloves boxer, forest firefighter, songwriter, and janitor — remembered it differently. He had indeed used an army helicopter to deliver a demo to the country music legend, but he’d never fly while holding a beer. “Those things,” he said of the helicopters that he once flew under under the bridges on the Thames, “require both hands.”

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Kristofferson was a bit of a handful himself. Along with working as a janitor at Columbia, Kristofferson had been earning extra money working weekends at the Air National Guard (from which he’d “borrowed” the helicopter) while trying to make it as a songwriter in Nashville. The Country Music Hall of Fame is filled with artists whose music was their way out of poverty. For Kristofferson, a child of privilege, the music is what put him into poverty: He had foregone a teaching position at West Point to be a “songwriting bum,” which is how his parents described him in their letter disowning him. Producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement had the letter in his office, and showed it to Cash, who had asked about this songwriter who had been slipping demos into his wife June Carter’s purse. Cash didn’t take to any of the songs, often chucking the tapes out of his bedroom window and into the lake below. After he heard that one that began “Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt,” he said to Carter, “that’s a good song.”

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” earned Johnny Cash a #1 country hit and the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year for 1970. It had previously been recorded by Ray Stevens¹ to some slight notice in 1969, but it wasn’t near enough for Kristofferson to quit his day jobs. Not long after hearing the demo, Cash recorded his version live at the Ryman Auditorium (The Mother Church of Country Music) for his television variety show, The Johnny Cash Show, where he gave it a very personal introduction: 

“I suppose we've all… all of us 'been at one time or another a 'drifter at heart’ … Not searching maybe for work as much as for self-fulfillment, or understanding of their life… trying to find a meaning for their life… And many who have drifted, including myself, have found themselves no closer to peace of mind than a dingy backroom, on some lonely Sunday morning, with it comin' down all around you."

He also said,  "Here's a song written by Kris Kristofferson. Don't forget that name."

Then I crossed the empty street

And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken

And it took me back to somethin'

That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way

On the Sunday morning sidewalk

Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned

'Cause there's something in a Sunday

Makes a body feel alone

There ain't nothin' short of dyin'

Half as lonesome as the sound

On the sleepin' city sidewalks

Sunday mornin' comin' down

There are a lot of country drinkin’ songs and a lot of down-and-out songs. Often, as with Webb Pierce’s classic “There Stands the Glass” (1953), a dissolute life is the result of heartbreak. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is the heartbreak. The song proceeds with the Tennessee Three at a slow trot, the lyrics revealing a succession of finely wrought everyday images that compound to create a palpable loneliness. There’s a sweet scene of a father pushing his laughing daughter playing on a park swing, for example, but the effect is like Edward Hopper’s painting Morning Sun, where instead of warmth, you feel isolation. Onto the weight of that loneliness, Cash piles his 10-ton voice. His straightforward phrasings are perfect; he lets the song come to the audience. Only at the end of a verse does he drop his voice so you feel as you’ve fallen off a sidewalk and into a cavern. 

By 1970, Cash still maintained a bit of his outlaw image, but his bass-baritone was like Cadillacs of the time: big and powerful in a way that Americans found comfortable. He was on television every Thursday when there were only three networks. It’s hard to imagine another artist of the time who could get audiences to go along on this lonesome Sunday morning walk that amounts to an existential hangover.

He was also sober for the first time since the ‘50s, having just recently kicked amphetamines (for the first but not last time). He sings “wishin’ Lord that I was stoned” as reverently as the gospel² he loved. The TV network brass asked him to change the lyric to “home.” Cash, with plenty of outlaw left in him, brushed them off in the name of artistic integrity. He sang from the heart — Listen to “Folsom Prison Blues,” him selling it to an audience of convicts doing hard time, even though he never spent more than a night in jail himself. Cash wasn’t going to deny the truth of the song, especially one he well knew.  

“It would not have been the same song without that line,” Kristofferson says as part of the DVD compilation of performances from The Johnny Cash Show, “God bless him.” Fifty-eight episodes of the program ran on ABC from June 1969 to March 1971, all recorded at the Ryman. Each show began with his trademark “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” but often what followed was unexpected for the Mother Church of Country Music. Cash’s booking policy also bore a bit of an outlaw streak. Along with Nashville stars like Marty Robbins, Tammy Wynette, and his ex-roommate Waylon Jennings, Cash insisted on performances from Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong³ (months before he died), Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, and Neil Young, as well as seminal country artists like Ray Price and Bill Monroe, who otherwise would never have been on primetime TV.

Kris Kristofferson sang his own version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on his debut, Kristofferson. While the song was also done by Willie Nelson on his 1979 album Sings Kristofferson and covered by Jennings, Roy Clark, and TV’s Kojak, Telly Savalas, Johnny Cash’s version will always be the definitive one. It just wasn’t the song on the demo Kristofferson delivered to Cash by helicopter. That was a song called “It No Longer Matters,” and according to Kristofferson, Cash wasn’t even home at the time. There’s a nice bit of irony in the demo’s actual song title, because as with most outlaw tales, the truth of the story hardly matters. Johnny Cash, The Man In Black, is a legend, and per John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

16 Song Playlist

Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, along with other notable versions of Kristofferson songs. I wish to heck that the production on the Highwaymen was drier, alas.

That “Girl from the North Country” Clip

Kojak Variety

Who love’s ya, baby?⁴ I do.

Hey, Thanks!

Thanks for all the support, ‘liking’ the posts and sharing with friends. Last week’s “We’re still going!” in this space resulted in a question of what kind of team was behind this weekly missive. The text part at least is just me. The “we” I meant was all of us, the diffuse sense of community I’ve felt hearing from you all and reconnecting with far-flung friends. It’s been great. Comments have been great and uniformly constructive. Keep ‘em coming! And do please keep sharing the posts. We could all deal with a larger community based the simple appreciation of what we like and love, especially when our tribes these days are so often based on the opposite.

1. Ray Stevens is best known for 1970 not-very-country, country hit “Everything Is Beautiful” and novelty songs like “The Streak” and “Ahab the Arab.” So yeah, no. His version will make you sad in all the wrong ways.

2. Johnny Cash is in the Country, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Gospel Halls of Fame.

3. Armstrong and Cash do Blue Yodel No. 9 by Jimmie Rodgers, “The Father of Country Music.” Armstrong played on the original 1930 recording.

4. This was the catch phrase of the titular police detective on the mid-’70s television show Kojak. He drove a 1974 Buick Century in Nutmeg Poly with the 455 V-8 (a 7.5 liter motor) and the magical ability to find parking spaces throughout New York City.