Kinky Friedman, 79, Dies; Musician and Humorist Slew Sacred Cows

Kinky Friedman, a singer, songwriter, humorist and sometime politician who with his band, the Texas Jewboys, developed an ardent following among alt-country music fans 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 near Austin, Texas. He was 79.

The writer Larry Sloman, a close friend, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Friedman occupied a singular spot on the fringes of American popular culture, alongside acts like Jello Biafra, the Dead Milkmen and Mojo Nixon. He leered back at the mainstream with songs that blended vaudeville, outlaw country and hokum, a bawdy style of novelty music typified by tracks like “Asshole From El Paso” and “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You.”

With a thick mustache, sideburns, a Honduran cigar and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat, he played his own version of Texas-inflected country music, poking provocative fun at Jewish culture, American politics and a wide range of sacred cows, including feminism — the National Organization for Women once gave him a “Male Chauvinist Pig Award.”

Behind the jokes, he had serious musical talent. He sang with a clear, deep voice, modulated with a gentle twang, and played guitar in a spare, straightforward style borrowed from one of his idols, Ernest Tubb.

He toured widely in the 1970s, with his band and solo, including on the second leg of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976. He performed on “Saturday Night Live” and at the Grand Ole Opry — Mr. Friedman claimed to be the first Jewish musician to do so (though in fact others, including the fiddler Gene Lowinger, had beat him to it).

Another performance, recorded for the TV show “Austin City Limits,” was reported to be so profane that it has never been aired.

In the 1980s, after the band broke up, Mr. Friedman turned to writing detective novels, using the same casual irreverence that he brought to the stage in books like “Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned” (2001) and “God Bless John Wayne” (1995).

He also wrote a column for Texas Monthly magazine in the 2000s, letting his freak flag fly with articles about politics, music and life in rural Texas.

Yet there was a surprising earnestness behind his weirdness. Mr. Friedman founded a ranch for rescue animals. He and his sister, Marcie, ran Echo Hill Camp, which they inherited from their parents and which they offered, free of charge, to children of parents killed while serving in the U.S. military.

“The Kinkster was a persona,” Mr. Sloman said. “Richard was one of the most sensitive, warmhearted people in the world.”

And while many people considered his independent run for Texas governor, in 2006, to be a joke, he insisted it was serious — and why not, given the recent successes of Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

He ran on a platform calling for drug legalization, an end to bans on smoking and a promise to lower the speed limit from 55 to 54.95 miles per hour. But he also called for higher pay for teachers and a crackdown on illegal immigration. He came in fourth, with 12 percent of the vote; the Republican incumbent, Rick Perry, won re-election.

Still, it could be hard to know when Mr. Friedman was joking and when he was serious — which, in his mind, was the point. A song like “Ride ’em Jewboy,” with its hilarious, offensive title, was in fact a sorrowful parable about the Holocaust.

“They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” was about antisemitism, and “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” ostensibly about the shooter who killed 16 people in Austin in 1966, mordantly flayed Texans’ love for all things big and outrageous. (“The chancellor cried ‘It’s adolescent/And of course it’s most unpleasant/But I gotta admit it’s a lovely way to go.’”)

But he wasn’t above simply poking fun, and other songs were less nuanced. “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” a mockery of feminism released in 1973, at the height of the women’s movement, earned condemnation from women’s groups; Mr. Friedman said that during a concert that year in Buffalo, a group of “cranked-up lesbians” stormed the stage.

Disarmingly, his biggest target was often himself.

“With a name like Kinky,” he told The New York Times in 1995, “you should be famous, 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 birth, the family moved to Texas Hill Country, west of Austin, where his parents founded and ran Echo Hill Ranch. His father also taught at the University of Texas.

As a child, Richard worked at the camp, played competitive chess and eased into his cowboy persona even as he proudly embraced his Judaism; when he was 9, he refused to participate in his school’s Christmas pageant.

He began playing music in high school, along with his friend and co-religionist Jeff Shelby, who later went by the name Little Jewford. Western swing, an off-kilter amalgam of country, polka and jazz, was at its peak, and he modeled himself on eccentric talents from that genre like Milton Brown and Bob Wills.

“I was the bastard child of twin cultures, and they seemed to have a lot in common, cowboys and Jews,” Mr. Friedman told The Aspen Times in 2006. “They both wear their hats indoors.”

He never married. He is survived by a brother, Roger, and a sister, Marcie Friedman.

Mr. Friedman studied psychology at the University of Texas, where a friend, seeing his ever-curly hair, gave him the nickname Kinky. After graduating in 1966, he spent two years in Borneo with the Peace Corps before returning to Texas and his musical career.

His first band, King Arthur and the Carrots, played songs that parodied surf rock; its only single, “Schwinn 24,” about a boy and his bicycle, played off Beach Boys songs about cars and girls. He joined Little Jewford and other musicians — all with outlandish stage names, like Wichita Culpepper and Sky Cap Adams — to form Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys in 1973.

The band was 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, “Sold American” (1973) and “Kinky Friedman” (1974), they found themselves in demand as an opening act for megastars like Mr. Dylan and Willie Nelson.

Gregarious and warmhearted, Mr. Friedman made friends easily, including Mr. Nelson, a fellow chess player, and the radio host Don Imus, who made him a regular guest on his show. But he also found himself enjoying the life a bit too hard: “There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction,” he wrote in 2004, “and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.”

After the Texas Jewboys broke up in 1979, he moved to New York, where he played small solo gigs in clubs and coffeehouses around his home in Greenwich Village.

In 1984, he was walking along a street, looking for cigars, when he saw a man assaulting a woman. He pulled them apart and waited for the police to arrive.

Later, he learned that the woman was Cathy Smith, who had been indicted in 1983 for injecting the comedian John Belushi with a lethal dose of heroin and cocaine.

“Out of 12 million people in the city, it had to be her,” he told Texas Monthly 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 rent, did laundry for the camp. He ran for justice of the peace in nearby Kerrville but lost after a newspaper revealed that he had let Abbie Hoffman, the 1960s radical, stay at the camp.

The incident with Ms. Smith inspired his second career, as a writer. Working out of a dark green trailer on the camp property, with only a cat and a pet armadillo for company, he wrote 18 books, including novels and essays.

Most of his fiction, starting with the 1986 novel “Greenwich Killing Time,” offered an even more gonzo version of his own life, built around a private detective from Texas, also named Kinky Friedman, who solved oddball crimes around New York.

Other titles had equally ridiculous names, including “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover.” His books sold swiftly, both in the United States and in Europe, eventually moving more than six million copies.

Mr. Friedman announced his run for governor in 2004 while standing in front of the Alamo in downtown San Antonio. Early slogans — “My Governor Is a Jewish Cowboy,” “How Hard Could It Be?” — seemed to hint at unserious intentions.

But with the support of other Texas musical celebrities like Mr. Nelson and Lyle Lovett, his campaign soon took flight.

“We’ve reached a point where Texans are taking this more seriously than I am,” he told The Aspen Times. “I didn’t think it would happen this soon.”

His lack of preparation showed, especially during a debate against Mr. Perry and other candidates. But his basic outsider appeal won over thousands of voters.

“The hopes of Texans are riding on this — cowboys, teachers, college students. Everybody,” he said. “I think the soul of Texas is riding on this campaign.”

After the race, Mr. Friedman returned to his Texas Monthly column, which he continued to write until 2010. He entered politics two more times, unsuccessfully running for state agriculture commissioner in 2010 and 2014.

He also returned to music, playing solo or with his old pals in the Texas Jewboys. His final album, “The Poet of Motel 6,” will be released this year.

And he spent an increasing amount of time on his ranch. The Echo Hill camp closed in 2013, but three years ago, he and his sister revived it, this time with a focus on helping the children of fallen service members as well as the children of refugee families from Afghanistan.

“There was a volunteer who fixed a water heater who I went over to thank,” he told Texas Highways magazine in 2023. “He said, ‘You’re welcome. I’m doing it for Jesus.’ I told him, ‘I’m doing it for Moses.’”