Kinky Friedman, a singer, songwriter, humorist and someday politician who along with his band, the Texas Jewboys, developed an ardent following amongst alt-country music followers with songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” — and whose biting cultural commentary earned him comparisons with Will Rogers and Mark Twain — died on Thursday at his ranch close to Austin, Texas. He was 79.
The author Larry Sloman, an in depth pal, mentioned the trigger was issues of Parkinson’s illness.
Mr. Friedman occupied a singular spot on the fringes of American standard tradition, alongside acts like Jello Biafra, the Useless Milkmen and Mojo Nixon. He leered again on the mainstream with songs that blended vaudeville, outlaw nation and hokum, a bawdy model of novelty music typified by tracks like “Asshole From El Paso” and “We Reserve the Proper to Refuse Service to You.”
With a thick mustache, sideburns, a Honduran cigar and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat, he performed his personal model of Texas-inflected nation music, poking provocative enjoyable at Jewish tradition, American politics and a variety of sacred cows, together with feminism — the Nationwide Group for Ladies as soon as gave him a “Male Chauvinist Pig Award.”
Behind the jokes, he had critical musical expertise. He sang with a transparent, deep voice, modulated with a mild twang, and performed guitar in a spare, easy model borrowed from one among his idols, Ernest Tubb.
He toured broadly within the Nineteen Seventies, along with his band and solo, together with on the second leg of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976. He carried out on “Saturday Evening Reside” and on the Grand Ole Opry — Mr. Friedman claimed to be the primary Jewish musician to take action (although in reality others, together with the fiddler Gene Lowinger, had beat him to it).
One other efficiency, recorded for the TV present “Austin Metropolis Limits,” was reported to be so profane that it has by no means been aired.
Within the Eighties, after the band broke up, Mr. Friedman turned to writing detective novels, utilizing the identical informal irreverence that he delivered to the stage in books like “Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned” (2001) and “God Bless John Wayne” (1995).
He additionally wrote a column for Texas Month-to-month journal within the 2000s, letting his freak flag fly with articles about politics, music and life in rural Texas.
But there was a stunning earnestness behind his weirdness. Mr. Friedman based a ranch for rescue animals. He and his sister, Marcie, ran Echo Hill Camp, which they inherited from their mother and father and which they provided, freed from cost, to kids of oldsters killed whereas serving within the U.S. army.
“The Kinkster was a persona,” Mr. Sloman mentioned. “Richard was one of the crucial delicate, warmhearted individuals on the earth.”
And whereas many individuals thought of his unbiased run for Texas governor, in 2006, to be a joke, he insisted it was critical — and why not, given the latest successes of Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
He ran on a platform calling for drug legalization, an finish to bans on smoking and a promise to decrease the pace restrict from 55 to 54.95 miles per hour. However he additionally known as for larger pay for academics and a crackdown on unlawful immigration. He got here in fourth, with 12 p.c of the vote; the Republican incumbent, Rick Perry, received re-election.
Nonetheless, it might be arduous to know when Mr. Friedman was joking and when he was critical — which, in his thoughts, was the purpose. A music like “Experience ’em Jewboy,” with its hilarious, offensive title, was in reality a sorrowful parable in regards to the Holocaust.
“They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” was about antisemitism, and “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” ostensibly in regards to the shooter who killed 16 individuals in Austin in 1966, mordantly flayed Texans’ love for all issues huge and outrageous. (“The chancellor cried ‘It’s adolescent/And naturally it’s most disagreeable/However I gotta admit it’s a stunning strategy to go.’”)
However he wasn’t above merely poking enjoyable, and different songs had been much less nuanced. “Get Your Biscuits within the Oven and Your Buns within the Mattress,” a mockery of feminism launched in 1973, on the top of the ladies’s motion, earned condemnation from girls’s teams; Mr. Friedman mentioned that in a live performance that yr in Buffalo, a bunch of “cranked-up lesbians” stormed the stage.
Disarmingly, his greatest goal was usually himself.
“With a reputation like Kinky,” he informed The New York Instances in 1995, “you need to be well-known, or else it’s a social embarrassment.”
Richard Samet Friedman was born on Nov. 1, 1944, in Chicago to Thomas Friedman, a psychologist, and Minnie (Samet) Friedman, a speech therapist. Shortly after his start, the household moved to Texas Hill Nation, west of Austin, the place his mother and father based and ran Echo Hill Ranch. His father additionally taught on the College of Texas.
As a toddler, Richard labored on the camp, performed aggressive chess and eased into his cowboy persona whilst he proudly embraced his Judaism; when he was 9, he refused to take part in his college’s Christmas pageant.
He started enjoying music in highschool, alongside along with his pal and co-religionist Jeff Shelby, who later glided by the identify Little Jewford. Western swing, an off-kilter amalgam of nation, polka and jazz, was at its peak, and he modeled himself on eccentric skills from that style like Milton Brown and Bob Wills.
“I used to be the bastard baby of dual cultures, and so they appeared to have quite a bit in frequent, cowboys and Jews,” Mr. Friedman informed The Aspen Instances in 2006. “They each put on their hats indoors.”
He by no means married. He’s survived by a brother, Roger, and a sister, Marcie Friedman.
Mr. Friedman studied psychology on the College of Texas, the place a pal, seeing his ever-curly hair, gave him the nickname Kinky. After graduating in 1966, he spent two years in Borneo with the Peace Corps earlier than returning to Texas and his musical profession.
His first band, King Arthur and the Carrots, performed songs that parodied surf rock; its solely single, “Schwinn 24,” a couple of boy and his bicycle, performed off Seaside Boys songs about vehicles and women. He joined Little Jewford and different musicians — all with outlandish stage names, like Wichita Culpepper and Sky Cap Adams — to type Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys in 1973.
The band was a part of a rising tide of country-rock bands, alongside acts like Gram Parsons, the Eagles and the Band. After releasing two well-received albums, “Bought American” (1973) and “Kinky Friedman” (1974), they discovered themselves in demand as a gap act for megastars like Mr. Dylan and Willie Nelson.
Gregarious and warmhearted, Mr. Friedman made buddies simply, together with Mr. Nelson, a fellow chess participant, and the radio host Don Imus, who made him an everyday visitor on his present. However he additionally discovered himself having fun with the life a bit too arduous: “There’s a positive line between fiction and nonfiction,” he wrote in 2004, “and I imagine Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.”
After the Texas Jewboys broke up in 1979, he moved to New York, the place he performed small solo gigs in golf equipment and coffeehouses round his house in Greenwich Village.
In 1984, he was strolling alongside a avenue, on the lookout for cigars, when he noticed a person assaulting a lady. He pulled them aside and waited for the police to reach.
Later, he discovered that the lady was Cathy Smith, who had been indicted in 1983 for injecting the comic John Belushi with a deadly dose of heroin and cocaine.
“Out of 12 million individuals within the metropolis, it needed to be her,” he informed Texas Month-to-month in 1993.
Mr. Friedman returned to Texas in 1986, partly in an effort to get sober. He lived at Echo Hill Ranch and, in lieu of hire, did laundry for the camp. He ran for justice of the peace in close by Kerrville however misplaced after a newspaper revealed that he had let Abbie Hoffman, the Sixties radical, keep on the camp.
The incident with Ms. Smith impressed his second profession, as a author. Figuring out of a darkish inexperienced trailer on the camp property, with solely a cat and a pet armadillo for firm, he wrote 18 books, together with novels and essays.
Most of his fiction, beginning with the 1986 novel “Greenwich Killing Time,” provided an much more gonzo model of his personal life, constructed round a non-public detective from Texas, additionally named Kinky Friedman, who solved oddball crimes round New York.
Different titles had equally ridiculous names, together with “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “The Love Track of J. Edgar Hoover.” His books offered swiftly, each in america and in Europe, ultimately shifting greater than six million copies.
Mr. Friedman introduced his run for governor in 2004 whereas standing in entrance of the Alamo in downtown San Antonio. Early slogans — “My Governor Is a Jewish Cowboy,” “How Exhausting May It Be?” — appeared to trace at unserious intentions.
However with the help of different Texas musical celebrities like Mr. Nelson and Lyle Lovett, his marketing campaign quickly took flight.
“We’ve reached some extent the place Texans are taking this extra critically than I’m,” he informed The Aspen Instances. “I didn’t assume it will occur this quickly.”
His lack of preparation confirmed, particularly throughout a debate in opposition to Mr. Perry and different candidates. However his primary outsider attraction received over 1000’s of voters.
“The hopes of Texans are driving on this — cowboys, academics, faculty college students. Everyone,” he mentioned. “I feel the soul of Texas is driving on this marketing campaign.”
After the race, Mr. Friedman returned to his Texas Month-to-month column, which he continued to put in writing till 2010. He entered politics two extra occasions, unsuccessfully operating for state agriculture commissioner in 2010 and 2014.
He additionally returned to music, enjoying solo or along with his outdated friends within the Texas Jewboys. His last album, “The Poet of Motel 6,” will probably be launched this yr.
And he spent an rising period of time on his ranch. The Echo Hill camp closed in 2013, however three years in the past, he and his sister revived it, this time with a give attention to serving to the kids of fallen service members in addition to the kids of refugee households from Afghanistan.
“There was a volunteer who mounted a water heater who I went over to thank,” he informed Texas Highways journal in 2023. “He mentioned, ‘You’re welcome. I’m doing it for Jesus.’ I informed him, ‘I’m doing it for Moses.’”
