In 1970, Johnny Cash had one of the most popular shows on network television. Before he sang a new song by a struggling young songwriter named Kris Kristofferson, ABC executives asked him to change one word. Cash thought about it, talked it over with Kris, and then walked onto the stage of the Ryman Auditorium. When he reached that line, he looked up at Kris in the balcony and sang it exactly the way it was written.
From Oxford to a Janitor’s Broom
Kris Kristofferson’s path to Nashville was unlike anyone else’s. He was a Golden Gloves boxer and a college football player who won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he immersed himself in William Blake and Shakespeare. He then served as an Army captain and helicopter pilot. He was even offered a position teaching literature at West Point.
He turned it down. Instead, he went to Nashville to write songs, a decision that stunned his family. To pay the bills and stay close to the music, he took a job as a janitor at Columbia’s recording studio. He later said he was sure he took the job so he could see Johnny Cash.
A Song About the Morning After
Out of those lean years came “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” a portrait of a lonely man waking up hungover on a Sunday, wandering the empty streets while the rest of the world heads to church and spends time with family. Kristofferson recorded it himself, and Ray Stevens released a version in 1969. But Johnny Cash heard something special in it.
Cash chose to feature the song on The Johnny Cash Show, which was taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and aired on ABC from 1969 to 1971. He gave it a spot in his “Ride This Train” segment, introducing it with a heartfelt monologue about drifters and lonely Sunday mornings, a feeling he admitted he knew himself.
One Word
There was a problem. ABC executives objected to one line, in which the song’s narrator wishes he were stoned. They worried it would offend viewers and suggested Cash sing that he wished he were home instead.
According to Rolling Stone, Kristofferson was backstage when the censors approached Cash. He told Cash that changing the word would change the meaning of the whole song, but he said he trusted Cash to handle it however he thought best.
The Look From the Stage
When the cameras rolled, Kristofferson was watching from the balcony of the Ryman. As he later told Cash biographer Robert Hilburn, Cash looked up at him at the exact moment he reached that line and sang it “the way I wrote it,” with “stoned” intact.
The performance aired in early 1970. Kristofferson never forgot it. Years later, he said simply that it would not have been the same song without that line, and added, “God bless him.”
A No. 1 Hit and Song of the Year
Cash’s version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” was released as a single at the end of July 1970. By early October, it was No. 1 on the country charts. Just four days after it reached the top, it won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year award, an honor that went to Kristofferson as the songwriter.
Kristofferson later told NPR that the song opened up a whole lot of doors for him. It was, he said, the song that allowed him to quit working for a living. Within a few years he had written classics like “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “For the Good Times.”
Brothers on the Highway
The two men stayed close for the rest of Cash’s life. In the 1980s and 1990s, they toured and recorded together with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings as The Highwaymen. Kristofferson admitted he sometimes had to pinch himself on stage, because every one of those men had been his hero before he knew them. Johnny Cash, he said, always felt like someone carved on Mount Rushmore.
The Last Visit
In 2003, Johnny Cash was grieving the loss of his wife, June Carter Cash, who died in May, and his own health was failing. Kristofferson went to see him one final time. He later described that last visit:
“I’ll never forget the last time I saw him, lying there in bed. He just held my hand. He couldn’t talk.”
Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003. Kris Kristofferson died in 2024 at the age of 88. More than half a century after that night at the Ryman, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is still sung the way he wrote it.
Do you remember seeing Johnny Cash sing “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on his TV show?