To Beat The Devil (Kris Kristofferson)

Cisco Freeman covers Kris Kristofferson song "To Beat The Devil" (1969)

This song is about or based on Kris K. and Johnny Cash being friends and seeing one another when JC was going through some hard time apparently pushing himself close to death....ready to meet the Devil.

Johnny Cash's struggle with addiction is about as contentious as his struggle with Outlaw Country and Fok Music as he seemed to struggle his whole life with the concept of letting being in control of his own life/destiny/self identity versus letting others tell him who he was and how to act. Often individuals find themselves unable to contol their desire for subtance and replace that same addiction with faith based obsessions.

One of my best friends loved to play music, live, hang out in bars, but also was an intellectual, a true scholar, that just so happened to love to drink beer, smoke pot, and cocaine. He did not like to get wasted, all messed up, he rarely drank booze or anything over 5% alcohol beer, when it came to marijuana he prefered not to smoke over the kind of stuff that knocked him out, and when it came to cocaine it was the same thing, he just liked to stay awake, alert, be engergetic....but when his cocaine got laced with heroin he had to admit he was beat...he was addicted..so he checked himself into rehab, got cleaned up, and started fresh.

It simply was not enough as his "haters" did not stop coming after him, trying to use him, for drugs, and or companionship, he was an easy target with lots of connections until finally he met his demise.

At his funeral I cried harder than I had ever cried in my life, the thing is/was, no one understood why I was crying, sure they must have thought I was sad to have lost my best friend, perhaps some understood I had a level of feeling guilty for his death...

but what no one understood....was I was standing in front of the Devil herself..as she gave his eulogy...as she made him an example..this woman that had fought to be the 1st female priest of the highest most corrupt church in the USA...responsible for infiltrating youth groups with drugs, the very one that killed him, using her own adopted childeren and husband that were all heroin addicts to sell more heroin under the guise of saving lives to the faith of christianity...on that day...I met the Devil Face to Face..the most evil horrific person I have ever met in my life...and to this day her and her flock continue to murder/kill those that do not share in thier faith, those that refute being addicted to their Christian ways are just a ways and means to them, disposable goods, to be used, and dimissed as drug addict non-believers of God...and that...brought tears to my eyes like never before..to see this woman..smile..relish in her ways...using my friends death and life to recruit others for her selfish ways.....

Sincerely ,

Cisco Freeman