In 1969, Kris Kristofferson was flying helicopters over the Gulf of Mexico.
He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a captain in the Army, and had turned down a teaching job at West Point to move to Nashville. To pay bills and child support while pitching songs, he took a job as a commercial helicopter pilot ferrying workers to and from oil rigs in the Gulf.
In a 2006 interview with Esquire, he explained the origin of the song, which was acutely tied in to what he was doing at the time.
“I was working the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs, flying helicopters. I’d lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. … But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people’s expectations, I was somehow free.”
It was in that helicopter, between rigs, that he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Producer Fred Foster had challenged him to write a song about a traveling man and shares the credit because the title idea was his. Kristofferson named the character for studio secretary Barbara “Bobbie” McKee, mishearing her surname.
Roger Miller cut it first in May 1969. It went to No. 12 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles.
Then it kept climbing.
In 1970, Gordon Lightfoot’s version hit No. 13 on Canada’s RPM Top Singles and No. 1 on RPM Country Tracks.
On October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin recorded it for her album Pearl, nine days before she died. Bob Neuwirth taught it to her while Kristofferson was in Peru filming The Last Movie. He didn’t hear her version until the day after she died. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1971 and also hit No. 1 in Australia—the second posthumous No. 1 in U.S. history after Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”
In December 1971, Jerry Lee Lewis released it as the B-side to “Would You Take Another Chance on Me” and took it to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country chart.
One song written in a helicopter. Three No. 1s for three legends.