Kinky Friedman was country music’s most prominent satirist. His 1973 debut album, Sold American, won him critical acclaim, and the admiration of musicians including Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. In the mid-1980s he began publishing mystery novels that were as offbeat and droll as his music, and he later ran for elected office in Texas several times.
Friedman, who has died of Parkinson’s disease aged 79, saw himself as part of a Jewish comic tradition although, unlike Don Rickles or Groucho Marx, he was too quirky and abrasive to appeal to mainstream America. This noted, he wrote several outstanding songs and loved playing the part of Kinky, the gruff Texan Jewish cowboy who mocked everyone.
He was born Richard Friedman in Chicago, the son of Thomas Friedman, a psychologist, and Minnie (nee Samet), a speech therapist. When Richard was four, the family moved to Texas, where his parents opened a summer camp, Echo Hill, in hill country near Austin. A bright child, Richard demonstrated a passion for chess and in 1951 was included as the youngest player in a team of 50 who challenged the US grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky in Houston. Friedman and all 49 teammates lost, but he recalled enjoying his first taste of media attention.
He graduated from Austin high school in 1962 and earned a degree in psychology from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1966. There, his curly hair won him the nickname “Kinky” and he formed his first band, who released one 45 satirising surf music. He served for two years with the US Peace Corps in Borneo and, on returning to Texas, set up a sanctuary for stray dogs at Echo Hill – animal rights would remain one of his passions.
Inspired by Nelson and Townes Van Zandt, Friedman began writing and singing country songs that prompted both laughter and outrage. Leading Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys (named in mocking homage to the western swing band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys), he impressed audiences but was ignored by record labels. Commander Cody – vocalist of the country rock band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen – introduced Friedman to Vanguard Records, the independent label that had launched Joan Baez, and this resulted in Sold American, a country album like none before.
The title track describes an old, down-on-his-luck country singer, while Ride ‘Em, Jewboy is a meditation on the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. If these songs were serious, The Ballad of Charles Whitman and Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed were designed to offend (the former concerned a Texan mass murderer, the latter a rejection of feminist demands for equality) – and they did: at a concert in Buffalo, New York, in 1973, a group of angry women invaded the stage and forced Friedman and the band to stop playing.
The critical praise and publicity Sold American received prompted the record label ABC to sign Friedman for an eponymously titled album, released in 1974. It reached No 132 in the US charts, a career best for Friedman, and contained They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore, a song based on a bar-room encounter with a drunken racist that became a Friedman staple. This time, reviews were lukewarm – Friedman himself was disparaging of the album’s production – and he left ABC.
Dylan hired Friedman as a support act for his US tours and then engaged him as part of the 1976 leg of his Rolling Thunder Revue tour. His third album, Lasso from El Paso, was recorded during the tour and issued on Epic. It would be his last album of largely original material for decades.
Friedman spent considerable time in Nashville, where he performed at the Grand Ole Opry (he claimed he was the first Jewish artist to grace the stage of country music’s most revered building) and where he worked as a professional songwriter, enjoying the camaraderie, if finding that his songs were rarely in demand.
Shifting to New York, Friedman won a loyal audience with his barbed stage spiel, and this encouraged him to move into writing books and performing standup comedy. In public, Friedman always wore a large Stetson hat and cowboy boots, while smoking huge cigars – this was how he presented Kinky to the world.
Greenwich Killing Time (1986) was the first of 18 Kinky Friedman Mysteries based around “the Kinkster”, a Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective. As with many of his songs, Friedman’s novels were wry satires that poked fun at US taboos. Initially they won good reviews – when President Bill Clinton endorsed Friedman as a novelist and invited him to the White House, it gave him his greatest prominence – but, by the turn of the century, with sales declining, he returned his focus to music, regularly touring. He also published nonfiction collections that found him musing on Texas, the US, country music and “political correctness” (which he hated).
From 2015 onwards, Friedman self-released several albums of new songs. The last of these was Resurrection (2019), an album that demonstrated a more mature, though still caustic, worldview. Friedman’s run for governor of Texas in 2006 ensured he got lots of publicity – he played up his Kinky persona on the campaign trail, and his policies included investing in education and ending the death penalty – but he won only 12.6% of votes. Attempts at getting elected to local government positions also ended in defeat.
In 2019 he and his sister, Marcie, reopened Echo Hill as a summer camp for children of military families.
Friedman is survived by Marcie and a brother, Roger.
• Kinky Friedman (Richard Samet Friedman), singer, songwriter and author, born 1 November 1944; died 27 June 2024
