Kris Kristofferson is a Country Music Hall of Famer who ranks among the most versatile of American talents. He finds himself releasing the third Don Was-produced album in a twilight years trilogy. His latest release, “Feeling Mortal” follows 2009's “Closer To The Bone” and 2006's “This Old Road” in examining hard-won grace. Don’t miss this living legend when he performs at the Taft Theatre on August 11th!

Kris Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1936 where he grew up with horses, Mexican and Country music, and Western movies. His father was a pilot for the military and the airlines, and the family moved to California when Kris was eleven. In time he worked as a laborer on construction jobs on Wake Island, the mountain roads of California, and in Alaska where he also worked as a gandy-dancer on the railroad and fought forest fires. He lettered in football in high school and college and fought in the Golden Gloves and at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a coveted “Blue” boxing against Cambridge. After Oxford he got married, became a father, and served four and a half years in the army, completing Jump School, Ranger School, and Flight School, then a three year tour of duty as a helicopter pilot in Germany.

In June of 1965 he returned to the U.S. as an Infantry captain, en route to the career school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and a subsequent assignment as a teacher of English Literature at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and made a fateful decision that would change the course of his life and confound his family and friends. He left the army and went to Nashville, Tennessee, to be a songwriter, supporting his family by working as a janitor at a recording studio, then as a bartender, and finally flying helicopters to off-shore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico before his come-from-nowhere rise to the top of the charts in Nashville and then Hollywood. Since then he’s been inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, is a three time Grammy winner, Best Actor Golden Globe ("A Star is Born"), received several awards with the Highwaymen (with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and the 2001 Diversity Award, and this year’s American Veteran Association’s "Veteran of the Year." He’s released eighteen solo albums, plus three with Rita Coolidge and three with the Highwaymen and has appeared in some fifty films, many of them solid Westerns, including three with Sam Peckinpah, "The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James," with Johnny Cash, and John Sayles’ "Lone Star."