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 Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore” — and whose biting cultural commentary earned him comparisons with Will Rogers and Mark Twain — died on Wednesday at his ranch near Austin, Texas. He was 79.
Little Jewford, a member of his band and a longtime friend, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause, but he said that Mr. Friedman had been ill in recent months.
Mr. Friedman occupied a singular spot on the fringes of American popular culture, alongside acts like Jello Biafra, the Dead Milkmen and Mojo Nixon. With a thick mustache, sideburns and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat, he played his own version of Texas-inflected country music, songs that poked fun at Jewish culture, American politics and a wide range of sacred cows, including feminism — the National Organization for Women once gave him its “Male Chauvinist Pig Award.”
Behind the jokes, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys had serious musical talent. They toured widely in the 1970s, including on the second leg of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976.
In the 1980s, he turned to writing detective novels, using the same casual irreverence that he brought to the stage in books like “Kill Two Birds and Get Stones” and “God Bless John Wayne.” He also wrote a column for Texas Monthly magazine in the 2000s.
Yet there was also a surprising earnestness behind his weirdness. Mr. Friedman founded a ranch for rescue dogs. He and his siblings, Marcie and Roger, ran Echo Hill Camp, which they inherited from their parents and which they offered, for free, to children of parents killed while serving in the U.S. military.
And while many people considered his independent run for Texas governor, in 2006, to be a joke, he insisted it was serious. He ran on a platform calling for drug legalization and an end to bans on smoking, but he also called for higher pay for teachers and a crackdown on illegal immigration.
A full obituary will be published soon.