Kinky Friedman, author, singer-songwriter and former Texas gubernatorial candidate , died Thursday after a years-long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Friedman was 79. “He died peacefully,” close friend Kent Perkins, who knew Friedman for about 50 years, told the Associated Press in confirming the death.
He said Friedman died at his family’s ranch near San Antonio. “He smoked a cigar, went to bed and never woke up,” Perkins said. Perkins described Friedman as the “last free person on earth” and said he had an “irreverence about him.
He was a fearless writer.” Friedman — born Richard Samet Friedman in Chicago on Nov. 1, 1944 — stirred buzz with his provocative and unapologetic nature, which became widely known when his band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, found success in the 1970s.
The satirical country band released songs such as “Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life,” “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed” and “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” But the band’s brash nature was apparently not well received by some. “In 1973, the Texas Jewboys received death threats in Nacogdoches, got bomb threats in New York, and required a police escort to escape radical feminists at the University of Buffalo,” the musician wrote in a personal essay for the September 2001 issue of Texas Monthly.
Friedman — who was nicknamed Kinky, or the Kinkster, because of his curly hair — then traveled wit.
