Kris' Liner Notes for Sammi Smith's debut album, "Help Me Make It Through the Night"

"Soul" is an overworked word which, like "genius", is used so often in a hype-oriented business as a substitute word for "talent", that its strength has been dissipated. At the same time, it's erroneous to consider it the exclusive property of the Poor, the Black, and/or the Wasted. It covers a pretty diversified field of artists (many of whom have little else in common), from Janis Joplin to George Jones, and if its various forms have a common denominator it is in the simple outpouring of honest emotion in which the singer's "self" is lost in the song and feelings are naked and exposed. It's not something that can be faked or learned, no matter how many of the "moves" of surface characteristics the artist may try to master. You've either got it or you haven't. Sammi Smith's got it.

Where she got it isn't really important, whether it was in the Oklahoma hills (where she was not born, but grew up after living four years in Orange, California) or somewhere along the lonesome road of heartbreaks and honky-tonks that took her at the tender age of 12 (where she started working six nights a week in a club in Oklahoma City) to the smokey sounds and shadows on the darker side of life. She's blessed (or cursed, as the case may be -- few names of happy soul-singers leap to mind) with a voice that's somehow tough and tender and touchingly honest, with the same shadow of sadness that haunted the songs of Edith Piaf.

Aside from that she's one helluva writer, with a gift for lyrics  and melody that makes a body want to smile (and if that body happens also to be writer, leaves him with vague feelings of despair). And she sure ain't hard to look at.

This is her first album. It won't be her last

Because, "She's got everything she needs
She's an artist; she don't look back."
Bob Dylan said that.

"If winters were just three days long
And all the rest were springs
I might feel up to writing songs
As sweet as Sammi sings."

I said that.

Kris Kristofferson
Noted Composer/Performer and Monument Recording Artist