Kinky Friedman’s Wit Turned the Jewish Cowboy Into a Texas Icon

Richard “Kinky” Friedman, a Texas icon who infused his songs, fiction, and campaign speeches with a unique and crass humor, died early Thursday, June 27. He was 79. Friedman “stepped on a rainbow” while surrounded by family and friends at his longtime home in the Hill Country’s Echo Hill Ranch, according to a statement released on his X account Thursday morning. He had, in recent years, lived with Parkinson’s disease.

Friedman was many things: a musician, a novelist, a satirist, a Texas Monthly columnist, a gubernatorial candidate, a summer camp cofounder, a Peace Corps volunteer, and—of course—a Jewish cowboy. Born in Chicago in 1944 to a World War II airman, Friedman relocated to Houston with his family the following year. He earned the nickname “Kinky” because of his curly hair. He spent his summers at the Echo Hill Ranch summer camp, eighteen miles west of Kerrville, which his parents opened when he was nine years old, and attended Austin High School and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Peace Corps after his 1966 graduation.

In 1973 he formed Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. The band’s song “Sold American” had a hit on the charts that year when it was covered by country music legend Glen Campbell. Friedman and the Texas Jewboys played in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, joining the festival-like tour in the spring of 1976. Those performances spawned the album Lasso From El Paso, which featured performances from T-Bone Burnett, Eric Clapton, Mick Ronson, Ringo Starr (who provided the voice of Jesus on the song “Men’s Room, L.A.”), and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones. It would be Friedman’s final album of original material for the next forty years. In 1998, his songs were recorded by artists including Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, and Dwight Yoakam for the tribute album Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman, and Friedman returned to music in 2016 with the release of Circus of Life.

In the meantime, Friedman became a prolific author, publishing his first novel, Greenwich Killing Time, in 1986. It would go on to become the first of eighteen books in the Kinky Friedman Mysteries—a series of cult hits that starred a fictional version of the author as a detective—which concluded in 2005 with the publication of Ten Little New Yorkers. Between 2002 and 2008, he published seven books of humor and commentary, as well as two novels outside the Mysteries series. 

He also joined the Texas Monthly family, to which he’d contributed occasionally in the 1990s, introducing a humor column, the Last Roundup, in the April 2001 issue of the magazine; the column ran through 2005. He continued his work with the magazine until 2011, and he appeared on its cover three times between 2002 and 2006. Evan Smith, who served as editor in chief of Texas Monthly during Friedman’s tenure, wrote on X that Friedman was “one of the most interesting, talented, complicated and unapologetically inappropriate people I’ve ever known.” 

Friedman’s efforts during the aughts, however, will likely be remembered best for his pursuit—initially quixotic, then surprisingly serious—of the state’s highest office with a 2006 run for governor. The campaign initially teetered somewhere between a joke and a lark; Friedman’s campaign slogans included “How hard could it be?” and “Why the hell not?” He raised money by selling bumper stickers that read “My Governor Is a Jewish Cowboy” and “He Ain’t Kinky, He’s My Governor” and ran on a vaguely libertarian platform that included legalizing marijuana and casino gambling, rolling back smoking bans that had recently passed in cities such as Austin, opposing toll roads, and legalizing gay marriage, a fiercely controversial issue at the time. 

Ever a contradictory fellow, his quasi-libertarian ethos found room for larger state spending; he vowed to increase funding for education and invest in alternative fuels in a state whose largest industry was (and is) oil and gas; on the question of abortion, Friedman declared, “I’m not pro-life, and I’m not pro-choice. I’m pro football.” 

Running as an independent, Friedman outraised Democratic candidate Chris Bell for stretches of the campaign and at one point polled within single digits of incumbent Republican governor Rick Perry. The race turned into a four-way battle between Perry, Bell, Friedman, and another independent, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a longtime Republican who had publicly feuded with Perry. 

The race concluded with Perry claiming victory with the smallest percentage of the vote (39 percent) a Texas governor had seen since 1861, when voters determined who would succeed Sam Houston. Friedman received the support of more than 540,000 Texans and came away from the campaign with 12 percent of the vote. He later told reporters that “God probably couldn’t have won as an independent.” 

In 2010 he ran as a Democrat in the primary for agriculture commissioner, losing to the party’s previous nominee by fewer than five points. 

During the last two decades, he lived on the Echo Hill Ranch his parents had founded as a summer camp in 1953. After it closed in 2013, Friedman and his sister, Marcie, reopened the facility in 2021 as a camp for children from gold star families. Its 2024 season began less than two weeks before Friedman’s death.

In a Texas Monthly column about the ranch, titled “Hummingbird Man” and published in 2003, Friedman wrote, “The juniper tree blew down in a storm two winters ago, but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart.

“And I still see my dad sitting under the juniper tree, only the tree doesn’t seem dead, and neither does he.”