OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 1982, after a second divorce and one of the biggest box-office disasters in Hollywood history left his career in ruins, 46-year-old Kris Kristofferson walked into a gym in Malibu, California, and met a 26-year-old Pepperdine law student named Lisa Meyers. Two years earlier, Kristofferson had hit rock bottom. His turbulent marriage to singer Rita Coolidge ended in 1980 right before his big-budget Western, Heaven’s Gate, collapsed in theaters and nearly shut the door on his leading-man film career. Doctors had already warned him that his heavy drinking would kill him before fifty, and he was carrying the weight of depression and two broken marriages when he crossed paths with Meyers. Unlike his earlier relationships inside the entertainment world, Meyers brought steady judgment and a life outside the spotlight. They married on the Pepperdine University campus in Malibu on February 18, 1983, and she soon stepped in to help manage his career and bring order back to his daily life. With that stability at home, Kristofferson found his creative footing again, joining friends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson in 1985 to form The Highwaymen. Away from the stage, he and Lisa traded the noise of Los Angeles for a quiet property in Hana on the island of Maui, Hawaii, where they raised their five children together: Jesse Turner, Jody Ray, Johnny Robert, Kelly Marie, and Blake Cameron. When severe memory loss struck Kristofferson in his seventies and doctors initially misdiagnosed him with Alzheimer’s disease, Lisa kept pushing for answers until specialists traced the problem to chronic Lyme disease, helping him gain back precious years with his family and his final tour dates. Their marriage lasted 41 years, carrying the former Rhodes Scholar, Army captain, and outlaw songwriter all the way to September 28, 2024, when he passed away peacefully at age 88 at their home in Maui with Lisa and his children around him.

Please scroll down for the video. It is at the end of the article!

In February 2016, after more than a decade of worsening memory loss that neurologists had attributed to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and depression, 79-year-old Kris Kristofferson underwent blood testing ordered after his cardiologist and his wife, Lisa Meyers, looked past the existing diagnoses.

When the laboratory results returned positive for Lyme disease, Meyers traced the likely infection back to 2005, when Kristofferson had spent six weeks crawling across the forest floor in Northeast Kingdom, Vermont, filming the independent drama Disappearances. For years afterward, he had taken prescribed medications for Alzheimer’s, fibromyalgia, and clinical depression while his short-term recall continued to slip away.

Once specialists took him off the Alzheimer’s drugs and placed him on targeted Lyme treatments in early 2016, his mental clarity returned within weeks. That medical reversal was the latest chapter in a partnership that had begun thirty-four years earlier in Malibu, California, when Kristofferson’s life and career were near collapse.

By 1982, the former Rhodes Scholar, Army helicopter pilot, and songwriter had gone through two divorces, including his publicized 1980 split from singer Rita Coolidge. His leading-man film career had stalled following the box-office disaster of Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western Heaven’s Gate, and doctors had warned him that his heavy drinking was damaging his liver.

That year, the 46-year-old singer walked into a Malibu gym and met Meyers, a 26-year-old law student at Pepperdine University. Unlike the musicians and actors who had surrounded him in Los Angeles and Nashville, Meyers was studying contract law and had little interest in the Hollywood social circuit.

The couple married on February 18, 1983, inside the chapel at Pepperdine University in Malibu. After finishing her legal studies, Meyers stepped in to help manage his business affairs, untangling decades of touring schedules and publishing commitments while encouraging him to leave the Los Angeles nightlife behind.

With order restored to his schedule, Kristofferson returned to recording in 1985 alongside close friends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson as The Highwaymen. Rather than raising their growing family in Southern California, Kristofferson and Meyers bought land near Hamoa Beach in the remote eastern town of Hana on the island of Maui, Hawaii.

Reachable primarily by the narrow, winding Hana Highway, the oceanfront property gave the couple 180 degrees of open Pacific horizon and almost no immediate neighbors. Over the next decade, they raised five children together on the island—Jesse Turner, born in October 1983, followed by Jody Ray, Johnny Robert, Kelly Marie, and Blake Cameron—while staying connected to Kristofferson’s three older children, Tracy, Kris, and Casey.

In Hana, the man who had written standards for Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, and Ray Price spent his days off the road clearing brush and mowing acres of coastal grass on his John Deere tractor. He and Meyers became quiet fixtures in the rural district, donating computers to Hana High and Elementary School and supporting local environmental efforts.

That daily routine on Maui made it obvious to Meyers when her husband began forgetting lyrics and losing track of conversations only moments after they ended. Refusing to accept that his decline was irreversible dementia, she accompanied him from specialist to specialist until the 2016 blood panels revealed the tick-borne infection.

With his memory stabilized after treatment, Kristofferson returned to the stage for four more years of international touring. Teaming up with Merle Haggard’s longtime backing band, The Strangers, he played packed theaters across North America and Europe, including a return to the Glastonbury Festival in 2017 at age 81.

He gave his final full concert on January 30, 2020, aboard the Norwegian Pearl during the Outlaw Country Cruise, closing the twenty-song set alongside The Strangers before quietly retiring to Maui the following year.

In April 2023, Lisa accompanied him to the Hollywood Bowl for Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday concerts, where Kristofferson walked onstage to sing one more duet with Rosanne Cash.

Seventeen months later, on September 28, 2024, Kristofferson died at age 88 at the house in Hana overlooking the Pacific, with Lisa and his children gathered in the home where she had protected his health and peace for forty-one years. For a quick look at how his medical turnaround unfolded, watch Kris Kristofferson: The Misdiagnosis That Gave Him Precious Time Back, which highlights how uncovering his Lyme disease restored his final years with his family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-J7mLyD3yc

Related Post

In the late 1980s, a few years after marrying his third wife, Lisa Meyers, Kris Kristofferson walked away from the noise of Hollywood and Nashville to move his growing family to the remote coastal town of Hana on the eastern edge of Maui, Hawaii. Reaching their new home required driving the winding 50-mile Hana Highway across more than 600 sharp curves and nearly 60 one-lane bridges. The small community had no traffic lights, no big supermarkets, and no paparazzi, giving Kristofferson the exact distance he wanted after watching the fast living of Los Angeles and Nashville claim close friends like Janis Joplin and fracture his earlier marriages to Fran Beer and Rita Coolidge. On their oceanfront acreage overlooking the Pacific, Kristofferson did not hire a staff to run the grounds. Wearing faded jeans and muddy boots, the Golden Globe winner and Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter spent his days tending the garden, fixing fences, and clearing his pastures himself from the seat of his John Deere tractor and lawn mower. To his neighbors in Hana and visiting friends like fellow Maui resident Willie Nelson, he was simply a quiet family man waving from his mower in the afternoon sun. The former Oxford Rhodes Scholar, Golden Gloves boxer, and Army helicopter pilot often shared that no Grammy trophy or academic honor ever gave him the peace he felt watching his children play safely across the grass he had just cut. For more than 35 years, Hana served as his sanctuary between world tours with The Highwaymen and film shoots like the Blade series, allowing him and Lisa to raise their five children alongside his three older kids far from industry pressures. Even when chronic Lyme disease later took a toll on his memory and guitar playing, those familiar pastures kept him grounded until September 28, 2024, when he died peacefully at age 88 right at home on the Maui land he had tended for over three decades.

On July 7, 2019, before a crowd of more than 65,000 people at London’s Hyde Park, 77-year-old Barbra Streisand paused her British Summer Time concert to welcome her 83-year-old A Star Is Born co-star Kris Kristofferson onto the stage. Forty-three years had passed since the pair filmed the 1976 box-office hit in Arizona, a collaboration that won both of them Golden Globe Awards as doomed rock star John Norman Howard and rising singer Esther Hoffman. Back in the 1970s, their strong creative wills had occasionally clashed on set, though Streisand never forgot the first time she saw him sing barefoot at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and knew right away he belonged on the big screen. Walking out in a black suit with his guitar, the 83-year-old songwriter moved slowly after years of battling memory loss from chronic Lyme disease. Together, they sang “Lost Inside of You,” the ballad Streisand had written with Leon Russell for their movie more than four decades earlier. Whenever Kristofferson’s weathered voice wavered on the timing, Streisand stepped in close, guided him gently through the lines, and reached up to touch his cheek and silver beard. Unlike the 1976 script that ended with his character’s fatal crash in the desert, the two stars had outlived the storms of their youth to grow old side by side in front of the fans who loved them. That summer evening in London became one of Kristofferson’s final major international appearances before he quietly retired from touring in early 2021. After he passed away on September 28, 2024, at age 88, Streisand looked back on their embrace at Hyde Park as a cherished final chapter with her old leading man.

On March 21, 2022, after completing an outpatient cosmetic procedure in Palm Beach County with normal initial vital signs, Mary Jane Thomas was discharged the same day to recover at the Jupiter Beach Resort & Spa in Jupiter, Florida. While her family back in Tennessee believed the operation had gone smoothly and that the 58-year-old was resting comfortably near the ocean, an undetected puncture to her parietal pleura from the surgery was slowly collapsing her lung inside the quiet hotel room. Without hospital monitoring equipment or her husband of 31 years, Hank Williams Jr., and their children right beside her, the gradual loss of breath unfolded out of sight over the next twenty-four hours. Around 5:00 p.m. on March 22, she became unresponsive in her room at the resort, and although local emergency crews rushed her to Jupiter Medical Center, doctors pronounced her dead shortly after arrival. For the 72-year-old country star, the hardest reality to bear was how far from home her final hours had taken place. When Williams nearly died on Montana’s Ajax Peak in 1975, friends had rescued him from the mountain and loved ones had stayed by his hospital bed through every surgery, and when their 27-year-old daughter, Katherine Williams-Dunning, died in a Tennessee highway crash in June 2020, her husband had been right there with her. Losing Mary Jane in a Florida hotel room without a chance to hold her hand or say goodbye left a deep ache inside the family’s Tennessee home. In the years since that afternoon in Jupiter, Williams and his son, Sam Williams, have poured their devotion into raising and looking after Katherine’s two young children, Beau and Audrey, protecting the family bond that Mary Jane spent her final years holding together.

On March 22, 2022, Mary Jane Thomas, the wife of Hank Williams Jr. for more than 31 years, died unexpectedly at age 58 at a medical recovery resort hotel in Jupiter, Florida, just one day after undergoing a routine cosmetic procedure. A former college track athlete and Hawaiian Tropic model who first met Williams at a concert in Washington state in 1985, Thomas had walked into surgery on March 21 in good health. According to the autopsy report later released by the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office, her death was not a random natural event, but the result of a punctured parietal pleura during liposuction that caused a collapsed lung. The loss struck a family still grieving the tragedy of June 13, 2020, when their 27-year-old daughter, Katherine Williams-Dunning, died in a highway rollover in Tennessee. For nearly twenty-one months, Mary Jane had poured her strength into caring for Katherine’s two young children and holding the household together alongside her husband and their son, singer Sam Williams. Williams and Thomas had married in 1990 and weathered a separation in 2007 before reconciling in 2011, growing closer than ever as they leaned on each other after losing their daughter. She had just stood beside her 72-year-old husband in November 2021 when he was formally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. For a man who had survived seventeen major reconstructive surgeries after his 1975 fall down Montana’s Ajax Peak and watched his older daughter Hilary pull through twenty-three trauma operations in 2006, losing his healthy wife overnight to a preventable surgical injury left a cruel silence at home. In the years since that March night in Florida, Williams and his son Sam have carried the memories of both Mary Jane and Katherine forward through their music and their care for the two grandchildren she loved.

On March 15, 2006, when a tire blowout on Interstate 55 near Tunica, Mississippi, sent his daughters Hilary and Holly Williams rolling into a deep ditch, Hank Williams Jr. dropped his schedule and flew straight to Memphis to help them fight through the kind of recovery he knew better than anyone. Twenty-seven-year-old Hilary and twenty-five-year-old Holly were driving south to Louisiana for their maternal grandfather’s funeral when the vehicle flipped. Despite a broken right wrist and an injured arm, Holly used her one good hand to crawl out of the wreckage and flag down help for Hilary, who was trapped inside the crushed metal for nearly an hour losing a massive amount of blood. A medical helicopter airlifted Hilary to the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis. She arrived in critical condition with a ruptured colon, bruised lungs, a shattered pelvis and hip, broken ribs, and broken legs, prompting doctors to warn the family that she might not survive or ever walk again. Watching his daughter in intensive care through the first of more than 23 surgeries brought back the summer of 1975, when a 26-year-old Williams fell nearly 500 feet down Montana’s Ajax Peak and endured almost twenty reconstructive operations of his own. For weeks in the Memphis hospital corridors, the 56-year-old country star traded his rowdy stage persona for the quiet patience of a father who knew exactly how it felt when the painkillers wore off. Whenever Hilary grew discouraged during her six months in the hospital and the grueling physical therapy that followed, the scars on her father’s face stood beside her bed as living proof that a broken body could be rebuilt. Both sisters made it all the way back, with Holly relearning the guitar with metal plates and screws in her wrist to build an acclaimed Americana career, and Hilary walking again to share her survival in her 2010 memoir Sign of Life and her 2018 album My Lucky Scars.

When the Country Music Association announced on August 12, 2020, that Hank Williams Jr. had been elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the honor arrived exactly two months after a highway rollover in Henry County, Tennessee, claimed the life of his 27-year-old daughter, Katherine Williams-Dunning. For 56 years on the road, Williams had fought to earn a place of his own beside his father, Hank Williams Sr., who was inducted in 1961. After losing his dad at age three and spending his childhood pushed onstage to imitate him, it took a nearly 500-foot fall down Montana’s Ajax Peak on August 8, 1975, and years of facial reconstruction behind his signature beard, dark glasses, and cowboy hat before he could finally record on his own terms as Bocephus. When the Hall of Fame call came that August, his family was still mourning Katherine, who had died on June 13, 2020, leaving behind her two young children, five-year-old Beau and two-year-old Audrey. Williams accepted the career milestone quietly, calling the news a bright spot during a hard season. Pandemic delays pushed the official Medallion Ceremony to November 21, 2021, at the CMA Theater in Nashville. Standing at the podium at age 72 with his son Sam and daughter Holly supporting him, Williams looked past his millions of records sold and Entertainer of the Year trophies to talk about the 1975 mountain fall that gave him his own voice and the family losses that humbled him. That November night became one of his family’s last moments of celebration together. On March 23, 2022, just four months after the induction, his wife of more than thirty years and Katherine’s mother, 58-year-old Mary Jane Thomas, died suddenly in Florida from a blood clot following surgery, leaving the Hall of Fame medallion to stand between two family goodbyes as the 72-year-old singer kept picking up his guitar and moving forward.

More than two decades after Conway Twitty died in 1993, Loretta Lynn sat by the stage in her late eighties and cried as she watched his grandson, Tre Twitty, take the microphone beside her own granddaughter, Tayla Lynn. For nearly thirty years after losing Conway, Loretta never replaced him with another regular male duet partner. Instead, before she passed away on October 4, 2022, at age 90, she gave her full blessing to the third generation, coaching Tre and Tayla on vocal phrasing and stage timing as they formed their touring tribute, Twitty & Lynn: A Salute to Conway & Loretta. The pairing brought both families back together after decades of road life and personal trials. Tayla, the daughter of Ernest Ray Lynn, had grown up on her grandmother’s tour bus and overcome years of addiction with Loretta’s support. Tre, the son of Michael Twitty, carried his grandfather’s warm baritone, stage posture, and familiar way of looking at his singing partner while holding her hand. Together, the two grandchildren took their grandparents’ catalog across the country to hundreds of sold-out rooms and onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Between performances of classics like “After the Fire Is Gone” and “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” they shared family stories from behind the scenes about the quiet loyalty that held the Twitty and Lynn households together for over half a century. In her final years, when long tours were behind her, Loretta joined her granddaughter and Conway’s grandson at their shows, deeply moved to hear the voice and presence of her late partner carried forward alongside her own bloodline. Since Loretta’s passing in October 2022, every stop on Tre and Tayla’s tour has served as a living farewell to both legends, keeping the bond between the two families on the stage where it started.

In 1994, just one year after Conway Twitty’s sudden death at age 59, Loretta Lynn had to watch from a distance as her singing partner’s nine-acre Twitty City complex and career keepsakes were sold off at public auction. Twitty had passed away in June 1993 before updating a will written prior to his 1987 marriage to his fourth wife, Dolores “Dee” Henry. Because her name was not in the older document, Henry filed in Tennessee court for a widow’s one-third share of the estate, sparking a drawn-out legal dispute with Twitty’s four adult children, Michael, Kathy, Joni Lee, and Jimmy. When Twitty opened Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1982, Lynn had sung at the grand opening. Beyond drawing hundreds of thousands of fans each year to his 24-room mansion and museum, Twitty had built separate homes inside the compound so his mother and children could live together around him. To raise cash for estate taxes, legal fees, and the court-ordered settlement, the family compound was dismantled in 1994. While Lynn was at home in Hurricane Mills caring for her own ailing husband, Doolittle, she watched the Trinity Broadcasting Network buy the Hendersonville property and change its name, while Twitty’s awards, stage clothes, and personal belongings went to the highest bidders. Refusing to add fuel to the headlines, Lynn stayed out of the press to protect the reputation of a partner who had always guarded his private life. Privately, she stood beside his former wife Mickey Jenkins and the four Twitty children who had grown up backstage alongside her own kids, preserving a family bond that outlasted the auction gavel and later returned to the stage when their grandchildren, Tre Twitty and Tayla Lynn, began touring together in their honor.

Between June 1993 and August 1996, Loretta Lynn lost both the singing partner who stood beside her onstage and the husband who had built her career from the very beginning. The unraveling began on June 5, 1993, inside Cox Medical Center South in Springfield, Missouri. While her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, lay recovering from open-heart surgery and leg amputations caused by diabetes complications, Conway Twitty died in the same hospital from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. Soon after that night, Loretta cleared most of her touring and recording schedule to bring Doolittle home to their ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. Contrary to decades of public rumors surrounding her fiery stage chemistry with Twitty, Doolittle and Conway were close friends. Back in 1953, Doolittle had bought his young Kentucky bride her first 17-dollar Harmony guitar and driven her from station to station to get her early records played, and in 1971 he was the one who urged her to team up with Twitty, defending their partnership for the next twenty years. For three years at Hurricane Mills, one of country music’s biggest stars stepped out of the spotlight to push her husband’s wheelchair and tend to him as heart disease and diabetes wore him down. Together at home, the aging couple mourned their friend Conway until Doolittle passed away on August 22, 1996, at age 69, just shy of their 49th wedding anniversary. Losing her anchor onstage and her anchor at home within three years left Lynn unable to record a new solo studio album for the rest of the decade. She finally returned to the studio for her 2000 album Still Country, pouring the silence left behind by both men into her self-penned tribute, “I Can’t Hear the Music.”