Songfacts®:

• "To Beat The Devil" is one of the more profound songs ever written, and it's embedded with some sage advice:
  
  If you waste your time a-talking
  To the people who don't listen
  To the things that you are saying
  Who do you think's gonna hear?
  
  The song is semi-autobiographical, telling the story of a songwriter in Nashville who has fallen on hard times. He's hungry and wanders into a bar where he meets an old man who buys him a beer, grabs his guitar and sings him a song about a world indifferent to his songs, which are destined to be scattered with the swirling winds of time.
  
  It seems this surly old man is the Devil himself, praying on the singer at his lowest ebb. But instead of giving up, he perseveres and adds the Devil's song to his repertoire. He may not have beat the Devil, but he drank his beer and stole his song.
• Kristofferson introduces this song with a spoken passage where he tells the story of running into Johnny Cash at a recording studio and noticing that Cash looked to be on the verge of death, which inspired the lyric. Cash was in bad shape in the late '60s, but got himself back together with the help of June Carter, whom he married in 1968. At the end of the introduction, Kristofferson dedicates the song to John and June, who helped show him how to beat the Devil.
• Kris Kristofferson really was a destitute songwriter in Nashville before becoming one of the city's biggest stars. After meeting Johnny Cash at the Grand Ole Opry in 1965, he quit the Army and became a full-time resident. In these lean years, the Oxford-educated Kristofferson worked as a janitor at CBS Studios and worked on his songs. He got encouragement along the way from folks like Cowboy Jack Clement and Tom T. Hall, either of which could fit the bill as the grizzled angel he meets in "To Beat The Devil."
  
  He released his debut album, which includes "To Beat The Devil," in April 1970. Also on the tracklist is "Sunday Morning Coming Down," which Johnny Cash covered a short time later, taking it to #1 on the Country chart in 1970. The next year, Janis Joplin's rendition of his song "Me And Bobby McGee" went to #1 on the Hot 100 following her death.