Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down

Kristofferson wrote "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" in 1969, living in a rundown Nashville tenement and working as a janitor at Columbia Records. In 2013 he said it opened up a whole lot of doors for him and was the song that allowed him to quit working for a living. Ray Stevens made the first recording in 1969 at Monument's studios, produced by Jim Malloy and Stevens, 4:25, and it reached number 55 on the country chart and 81 on the Hot 100. Kristofferson said at the 2009 BMI Country Awards that on hearing Stevens's version he just sat on the steps and wept.

His own version is the closing track of Kristofferson, 4:34, produced by Fred Foster. Johnny Cash recorded it live at the Ryman Auditorium for The Johnny Cash Show in 1970, in a Ride This Train segment with filmed background of a wanderer in Shelbyville, Tennessee; the single on Columbia, 4:04, produced by Bob Johnston, reached number one on the country chart (October 10, 1970), number 46 on the Hot 100 and number 13 on Adult Contemporary, and won the CMA Song of the Year, in October or November 1970 depending on source. Kristofferson says television executives told Cash to change a lyric and that Cash refused. Cash's account is that Kristofferson landed a National Guard helicopter in his yard to deliver a demo; Kristofferson told a California paper in 2008 that he knew Cash before then and would never dispute his account.

Waylon Jennings recorded it in 1971, Vikki Carr in 1970 and Gretchen Wilson in 2006, and Louis Neefs sang it in Dutch. Rolling Stone ranked it number 476 on its 500 greatest songs in 2021 and number 96 on its 200 greatest country songs in 2024. The phrase cleanest dirty shirt entered finance talk through Paul McCulley, who told Forbes in 2024 that he borrowed it deliberately from the song. Setlist.fm ranks it second among Kristofferson's most played songs with 179 plays. Which version our upload carries is not known from its title.