Kinky Friedman, Proudly Eccentric Texas Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 79 (2024)

Kinky Friedman, the eccentric country singer-songwriter whose musings, novels, one-liners and quixotic gubernatorial run made him a folk hero, died Thursday at age 79 at his home in Texas.

“Kinky Friedman stepped on a rainbow at his beloved Echo Hill surrounded by family & friends,” a statement on X read announcing his death. “Kinkster endured tremendous pain & unthinkable loss in recent years but he never lost his fighting spirit and quick wit. Kinky will live on as his books are read and his songs are sung.” The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to Texas Tribune.

Friedman’s oddball magnetism and “fearless Texas chutzpah,” as his friend Taj Mahal once described it, in his writings, stump speeches, songs, and interviews, cemented him as a media darling and a songwriter’s songwriter who befriended several presidents (George W. Bush, Bill Clinton) and considered Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson some of his closest friends.

In 2006, Friedman ran a longshot and humorous campaign for governor of Texas, managing to earn 12 percent of the vote. “I got my last will and testament worked out,” Friedman said in 2014, in one of his favorite catchphrases. “When I die, I’m going to be cremated and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair.”

Richard Samet Friedman was born in 1944 in Chicago, the son of two Jewish progressives who soon moved the family to Houston and began operating Echo Hill Ranch, a summer camp that Friedman’s family would run for decades and that Kinky would call home for much of his life.

Friedman moved to Austin for college, joined the Peace Corps, moved to Borneo, then ended up in Nashville to write songs in the early Seventies. To deal with stage fright, Richard adapted a stage name based on an old college nickname: Kinky.

“I didn’t think the name Richard Friedman was a good name for a struggling country artist of the outlandish type I had imagined,” he told his biographer, Mary Lou Sullivan. Kinky began touring as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, performing a type of hard-edged Seventies outlaw country that fused rock and country and landed him on Saturday Night Live.

Friedman’s best known album, 1973’s Sold American, established the Chicago-born Jewish country singer as a renegade willing to test barriers, even among the outlaw country crowd of Nelson and Waylon Jennings, who were his country music contemporaries.The songs were sardonic and provocative in the way they championed irreverence and lampooned Southern small-mindedness. They were often brilliant, though sometimes caustic to the point of ugliness. (One of his most famous songs, “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” is filled with slurs.)

“I thought he was brilliant, and very brave,” Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player and a friend and collaborator of Friedman’s, told Rolling Stone in 2018. “I got the joke, but I wouldn’t have wanted to stand too close to him at that time. I still keep my distance. It was like, ‘That’s funny, but don’t say you know me.’”

After a series of cult albums failed to register commercially, Friedman switched gears and embarked on a successful career as a novelist and, eventually, in 2001, a columnist at Texas Monthly, where his Texanist column introduced readers nationwide to his dark wit and slapstick pathos.

He developed a cult of personality through his oft-repeated catchphrases (“Friedman’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”), cigar-chomping demeanor, and frenetic energy.He ran for governor of Texas in 2006, transforming his populist campaign (a few slogans: Why the hell not? and How hard can it be?) into a nonstop wisecrack barnstorming tour: He claimed Willie Nelson would become his energy czar, sold Kinky Friedman talking action figures that said things like “I’ll sign anything but bad legislation,” and quoted Warren Zevon when asked the first thing he’d do if elected: “I’ll sleep when I’m governor.”

In 2018, Friedman returned to writing songs after more than three decades with Circus of Life, a surprisingly earnest, stripped-down collection of folk songs devoid of the typical Kinky bluster and full of a “vulnerability he never would have tolerated in himself long ago,” as his brother, Roger Friedman, put it.

“Somewhere I read that having an alter ego is a very good way of shielding yourself from suffering,” he told Rolling Stone. “I thought that was interesting.” In his later years, Friedman remained devoted to Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, the refuge for rescue animals he founded in 1998. He lived by himself amid dogs and hummingbirds at the Echo Hill Ranch he grew up on and continued to write and record music, even, as the Texas Tribune reports, he grew ill in the past few years.

Following his death, Friedman’s estate posted an excerpt from one of his columns in 1993, this one about his lifelong devotion to animals: “They say when you die and go to heaven, all the dogs and cats you’ve ever had in your life come running to meet you.”