Delta Lady: A Memoir

Prologue

I was doing the dishes when I realized I was going to be all right. It was March 1977 and my life was in turmoil. I was about to turn thirty-two and my tumultuous six-year marriage to Kris Kristofferson—the love of my life and father of our three-year-old daughter, Casey—was nearing an acrimonious end. Two months earlier, I’d miscarried our second child, whom Kris and I had both hoped, unannounced to the other, would heal our relationship. I had been numb to the world ever since. But that afternoon, washing the dishes in the simple ranch house that I’d found for us in the hills above Malibu—where I had once thought Kris and I might live for the rest of our lives—I suddenly heard my voice float out of the kitchen radio.

By then I was used to hearing myself on the air. I’d sung on everything from Stephen Stills’s Love the One You’re With to Eric Clapton’s After Midnight and Ray Charles’s R&B classic Busted. I’d released four solo albums, which tended toward rock-tinged pop and romantic ballads. Kris and I had won a Grammy in 1974 for our performance of Kris’s From the Bottle to the Bottom and another in 1976 for Lover Please. (Our signature number on stage was Help Me Make It Through the Night, which when things between us were right we sang as much to each other as to the audience.) My albums had sold moderately well and I was thrilled to have devoted fans, but I’d yet to break through as a solo artist.

I’d just released my sixth album, Anytime . . . Anywhere. My producers David Anderle and Booker T. Jones and I had decided to record several covers of R&B hits, including Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher built around a really inventive arrangement by Booker that just floored me and my label, A&M, which released the song as the first single off the album. Higher has such an affirming vibe, and I was looking for hope wherever I could find it that afternoon in Malibu when the song came on the radio. I shut off the water, wiped my hands on my apron, and listened. Your love, I sang a cappella, at a hymn’s tempo, is lifting me higher . . . than I’ve ever been lifted before . . . After a full stop, a bass drum thumped four times, a killer guitar riff kicked in, and my version of Higher took off like one of the gulls kiting over Los Flores Beach far below. Listening to myself sing about the redemptive power of love stirred my heart for the first time in months, and in that moment I had an epiphany: Not only would I survive this difficult time, but I would thrive. As I have heard so many times from other artists whose ships finally came in, it was also such a typical moment. The song that would become my anthem—which I close my shows with to this day—arrived while I was laid low by grief and, literally, washing the dishes.

The next thing I knew, Higher had shot straight up the charts to number 2. I’d never had a song remotely that big. Anytime . . . Anywhere hit number 6 and was certified platinum, selling more than a million copies. I’d never sought stardom or success at that level but it had come anyway, at the bleakest moment of my life. It also put me on equal footing, professionally, with Kris. We toured together behind Anytime . . . Anywhere but it was different from past shows. He would be on stage for his portion of the show and people would be yelling Rita! between his songs, and I’d feel so bad about that. Despite our differences, Kris was proud of my success, even though it might have been tinged with envy—he was in great shape with his movie career (he’d costarred with Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born the year before) but more than anything wanted to be recognized as a singer and songwriter. He’d written classics like Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin’s biggest hit, and Sunday Morning Coming Down, for Johnny Cash, and had cofounded, with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and other renegade singer-songwriters, the so-called Outlaw movement that had shaken Nashville’s traditional country music scene to its foundations. But as his movie career took off, Kris spent less and less time on his music, which frustrated him and fueled some of the heavy drinking and anger that inevitably was turned toward me.

Touring together when we were having such grave problems in our marriage was a challenge. For years, I’d been pressing Kris to go to counseling with me, but he steadfastly refused. We both had strong personalities and tended not to back down in an argument. When you factored in Kris’s drinking—though he’d abruptly quit after A Star Is Born—and his desire to fulfill his outlaw image whenever and wherever possible, we were rapidly approaching an emotional cul-de-sac that I knew we might not escape. The worst part of it was dealing with his womanizing. Connie Nelson—Willie Nelson’s former wife and still one of my best friends—used to laugh and say, Isn’t it great? We’re the younger women. Guys usually left their wives for younger women, and Kris was nine years older than me. Little did Connie and I know (but we should have): there’s always a younger one.

It wasn’t that Kris’s fame blinded me to his faults. Before Kris I’d had serious relationships with Leon Russell and Graham Nash, and had spent plenty of time around famous—and famously unpredictable—musicians such as Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton. But by the time of Anytime . . . Anywhere Kris had escalated his emotional attacks. He didn’t think I was as good a writer as he was—I wasn’t—and had begun to actively belittle my work. I tried to keep the marriage together—not only for Casey’s sake, but because the love that had enveloped Kris and me was unprecedented in both of our lives and, I believed, worth fighting to keep.

Kris and I were on the road—Casey was with us—when the breaking point arrived. I had returned to our hotel suite from running an errand and Kris just started yelling at me, needling me, demanding to know where I’d been. It was a fight we’d had a hundred times before. Casey was pleading, Please stop, please stop. I turned to Kris and said, Done. I’m done. I can’t do it anymore. That’s when I made the decision to leave. But the actual walking out the door came later that year when Kris was shooting Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in Montana, and I sussed out that he had something going on with his leading lady, Isabelle Huppert. At that point, after all we’d been through, I just didn’t feel like I fit in to his life anymore—unless I was willing to be the wife who stays at home and turns a blind eye.

I don’t remember confronting Kris on the Heaven’s Gate shoot. I don’t remember the words that were said, though I must have said them. What I do remember is walking out of the hotel suite and going home finding a house in Hollywood to rent packing everything up and taking Casey with me. It didn’t hit Kris until he walked in the Malibu house and saw that some of the furniture was gone. Of course once I left, Kris was willing to do all the things I had asked him to do for years. He wanted to see a marriage counselor, but it was too late. Once I walk out the door, I don’t come back, I had always warned him. Once it’s done, it’s done. And now it really was done for me.

Kris and I were together eight years. Eight years. There were fabulous times. We literally made beautiful music together. What we went through—from the moment we met and for eternity—is something bigger than I’ve ever had with anybody else. I never laughed with anybody in my life like with Kris. Everything we did was larger than life. When it was good I was absolutely over-the-moon happy. And when it was sad it was almost too much to bear.

The success of Anytime . . . Anywhere was a gift that propelled my career and my life for years afterward. I’ll always be grateful for the doors it opened for me. But I feel like when that all happened I was so young, I didn’t really know my craft. I think there is something to be said for the years of living the music that you’ve been singing, when you understand what the song truly means. When I recorded I’d Rather Leave While I’m In Love, I thought, That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard—who would do that? And then I walked through that door myself three months later.

Life needs art to express emotions we find too painful or unknowable to express ourselves. To paraphrase Apple’s slogan, whatever you’re going through, there’s a song for that. As my Cherokee grandmother told me when I was a girl in Tennessee, It’s all about listening.

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up

I’m told when I was a baby I could sing before I could talk. I do remember singing harmony with my sisters in church—my father was a Baptist minister—when I was two. I could barely say the words but I could sing. I was the shyest little kid in the world unless somebody said, Would you sing? Mother and Daddy and my aunts and grandmothers and my sisters, Priscilla and Linda, all sang, so music was a natural part of our lives, just like sleeping and eating. Singing with my sisters gave me a sense of harmony and how important that is. So we grew up realizing the value of music and art in the lives of children from the time they were born. It also marked us as outsiders—I think deep down inside I probably always knew that. Mother would say, Honey, we’re not like other people. And Priscilla and I, all of our lives, we’ve told our kids: We are a family of artists and singers, and things function differently in our lives, and we see things and hear things differently.

I had the best parents in the world. They just adored each other. They never argued. The only time Mother ever got mad at Daddy was when he took his boat out and a storm was coming in and she had to send the Coast Guard to find him. That was the only time I ever heard her raise her voice to him, and they were married seventy-five years. Daddy was Cherokee and Mother was of Cherokee-Scottish lineage, which was common in Kentucky and northern Tennessee, where I was raised. Because Kentucky was so much like Scotland a lot of Scots settled there. And because the Scots and Cherokee were both tribal—the Scots had clans and so did the Cherokee—there were a lot of Cherokee-Scotttish intermarriages. Well, that and the fact that the Cherokee women were so incredibly beautiful. Daddy never felt anything but a great deal of pride in his Cherokee blood, despite being spat upon when he was a child in Texas. Mother was a teacher. She didn’t get paid for it but always stayed after and made sure that the school she taught in had a music program. She did it on her own time because she knew how important music was for kids—you’ve got to have more than ABCs and math. It’s not a full program of learning and relating to the world without music and art. Daddy did the same thing with his Sunday school students—everything about him was creative. He was a visual artist and his paintings are all over my house today.

I really was Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. I related to that little girl and to the racism that Atticus Finch refused to be a part of and how he stood behind and with the black people, because that’s what Daddy did. I was that little girl going to white churches with my family in Lafayette, Tennessee, a small town northeast of Nashville just south of the Kentucky border. I never saw a black person until I was six years old, when Mother and I were in Nashville. Black people were not even allowed to drive a truck through Lafayette, or for that matter, all of Macon County. Supposedly, during the Civil War, a black woman had killed a white baby and they had hung her in the holler behind my grandmother’s house. I knew the tree where it was said they had hung her.

Later, when we lived in Nashville, a black woman—her name was Miss Maggie—would come and clean our house. Mother would let me go and spend the night at her house and go to church with her because in our house, the color of your skin didn’t matter; it only mattered if people were disrespected or treated badly because of that. And then Daddy would be up in arms about it because of what he’d been through as a part Indian boy in Texas. That was just not anything that his kids were ever going to experience. When we played cowboys and Indians we’d say, Bring ’em on, we’ll kick your butts.

The one thing I learned from watching Daddy from the time I was little is that if there’s some kind of injustice being done or spoken about and you don’t say something, then you become a part of it. So it became so important to me to do that, to let my daddy’s voice live in me and behave that way wherever I went. When I was in grade school I couldn’t allow people to say bad things about people of color in my presence—Daddy wouldn’t tolerate it, so neither would I. I would say, I can’t stand here and be with you if you’re going to speak this way. You move away from prejudice because it will stick to you if you don’t. I think Daddy was as close to God as any human being. He taught by example; he really walked his talk and lived what he preached in every way. We didn’t sit down for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner until he knew that everybody who didn’t have what we had—any of the church members or anybody in the county that he knew needed something—had been taken care of; he just would not be able to sit down.

There was a little girl who came to our school, Rachel. You could always tell the really poor kids when they would migrate through—her family had homesteaded this old house a few miles down the road from us and Rachel actually walked to school. It was probably five miles. Everybody was so mean to her. And I just couldn’t take it, so I became Rachel’s best friend. One day I decided to go home with her after school and when I got to her house and opened the refrigerator there was nothing. I was going to call my parents and tell them where I was, not realizing that Rachel didn’t have a phone. Meantime, I’d given Rachel my coat—it was gray wool with a burgundy velvet collar and cuffs—because they had no heat in her house. I thought, Well, I’ll give Rachel my coat and I’ll get another one. I was walking down the road with Rachel when Daddy came along looking for me and he took her home. Afterward I’m sure he made certain something was done for that family. But I didn’t get a new coat—I got a hand-me-down.

My parents met when they enrolled in Madison College, a Seventh-day Adventist college in Nashville, in the thirties. They both worked their way through school because