literally stories

Kris by Dale Williams Barrigar

In 2006 and 2009, at the ages of 70 and 73, Kris Kristofferson released two classic American folk albums that remain virtually invisible to the population at large, the mainstream media, and the general American culture, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who’s THERE but largely un-talked of, or Herman Melville, who half-invisibly spent the last decades of his life haunting the New York streets as a striking, but “unknown,” individual who looked half like a bearded mystic in a rumpled suit, half wandering minstrel just in from the sea. How strange it is to think that he was also probably passing bearded, informally dressed Walt Whitman on the street many times during those days, as writer Harold Bloom has pointed out. One wonders if they nodded to each other.