In early 1970, the ABC television network had a problem with one word in a country song. The song was “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” written by a young man most of America had never heard of: Kris Kristofferson. The singer who had to decide what to do about it was Johnny Cash.
What Cash decided, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, became one of the best-loved stories of respect between two country artists.
The Janitor Who Wouldn’t Quit
Kris Kristofferson did not look like a struggling songwriter on paper. He was Texas-born, a Rhodes Scholar and a former Army captain. But in the late 1960s, he was sweeping floors as a janitor at Columbia Records’ studios in Nashville, where Johnny Cash recorded. He had been told he could lose the job if he pitched his songs to the artists who came through.
He found other ways. He pitched songs to people in Cash’s circle without much luck. June Carter liked him and would carry his demo tapes home in her purse. Then, during a National Guard flight, Kristofferson landed a helicopter on the Cash property at Old Hickory Lake with a tape in hand. Cash loved to tell that story his own way, insisting Kris climbed out holding a beer in his other hand. Kris disputed the beer and even doubted Cash was home that day, but the stunt became country legend.
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” had already been recorded once. Ray Stevens cut it in 1969, and his version stalled at No. 55 on the country chart. It was still waiting for the right voice.
One Word the Network Didn’t Like
From 1969 to 1971, ABC aired The Johnny Cash Show, taped at the Ryman. One of Cash’s favorite parts of the program was a segment called “Ride This Train,” where he told stories about American life. He chose “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” for it, and introduced it by talking about his own father, who had hopped freight trains looking for work during the Great Depression. Cash added that he, too, had known lonely Sunday mornings as a drifter.
The song is about a man waking up alone and hungover on a Sunday, walking through a town full of families and church bells and feeling shut out of all of it. The network’s concern was a single word in the chorus. ABC wanted Cash to sing that he wished he was “home” instead of “stoned.”
It would have been an easy change. But the word carried weight, and Cash knew it. He had fought his own long battle with pills, and the song’s loneliness was not foreign to him. He thought about the request, and he asked Kristofferson what he thought. Kris told him that taking the word out would change what the song meant, but that he trusted Cash to do the right thing.
The Look Up to the Balcony
Cash taped the performance at the Ryman on February 25, 1970. Accounts of where Kristofferson stood that night differ; one 2009 profile placed him backstage. But years later, Kristofferson told Cash biographer Robert Hilburn that he was watching from the Ryman balcony.
When Cash reached the chorus, he sang the line just as Kristofferson had written it, word for word. And at that moment, Kristofferson remembered, Cash “looked up at me just when he sang the line.”
No speech, no announcement. Just a nod from the most famous man in country music to a janitor in the cheap seats, letting him know the song was safe.
What One Word Was Worth
The episode aired that spring. Columbia released Cash’s live performance as a single at the end of July 1970. By October, it was No. 1 on the country chart, where it stayed for two weeks. That fall, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” was named Song of the Year by the Country Music Association.
For Kristofferson, it changed everything. In a 2013 interview with NPR, he said the song opened doors with the people he admired most, and he summed up what it meant to him simply:
It was the song that allowed me to quit working for a living.
The janitor hung up his broom. Within a few years, Kristofferson songs like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” were everywhere. Years later, Cash and Kristofferson stood side by side again as half of the Highwaymen, with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
Johnny Cash died in 2003. Kris Kristofferson died on September 28, 2024. But the moment at the Ryman lives on in that performance, a reminder that sometimes the greatest thing one artist can do for another is leave his words alone.
Do you remember the first time you heard Johnny Cash sing “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”?