I can see Kris Kristofferson sitting in my den playing "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and remember mine and June's reaction to the song. It's one of those songs that you just know is a classic and you know it so well that you are almost afraid to record it because you are afraid you will mess it up. So I didn't-not for two years after I heard it. Now it's as much a part of me as "Hey Porter" or "Folsom Prison Blues" 

-Cash 1970

SONG COMMENTARY FROM   MHIC@aol.com

"SMCD" was a very autobiographical song. When it was written, Kristofferson was working as a bartender in Nashville, and the song reflected his situation at the time: his wife and daughter had moved back to California; he was living in a condemned tenement building; and Sunday was the worst day of the week if you didn't have a family. The bars didn't open until the afternoon, so if you had no family there was nothing to do all morning. Ray Stevens, who was recording for Monument Records (while Kris was a staff writer for Combine Music, the publishing wing of Monument), loved the song and made a big commitment to it. However, the record label was not enthusiastic and the single bombed badly.

Then, R & B singer Hank Ballard--who had written "The Twist" did a soul version of the song. It appears that Kristofferson and John had not yet met at this time. Now, "The Pilgrim (Chapter 33)" with all its obvious references, had many elements of John in it, although sifting through the legend which has built up back to the beginning, Kris never knew John when he was "wasted..in your bedrooms and your bars," since by 1969, when Kris was working as a janitor at Columbia Records, John was on the top of the world, the most powerful artist on the label at the time, including Simon & Garfunkel and Barbra Streisand. Moreover, "The Pilgrim" did not come along until Kris' album "The Silver Tongued Devil and I", well after "SMCD's" genesis.

Some notes about John's epochal recording of the song: ABC TV did not allow John to sing the correct line about "the small boy cussin' at a can that he was kickin'," changing it to a more benign "playin' with a can", although Vicky Carr had sung "cussin'" when she first did it. John gave in on that point. However, he would not give in when they wanted to change the line about "wishin', Lord, that I was stoned" to "wishin' that I was home". Such a change would have been more romantic, perhaps, but would have ruined the true bleak nature of what Kristofferson had in mind. That said, both Stevens' and John's versions are unlike Kris' own rendition of the song. Both of theirs turn it into a hopeful, even soaring chorus (Bill Walker's orchestra on John's recording, with all the lush strings--a precursor certainly of Ray Price's handling of many of Kris' writings--couldn't do anything but "sweeten" it). Kris' is really the plaintive scream of a wasted loser ("And there's nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound"!).-Mark