Kinky Friedman: His Essential Songs (2024)

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• “Sold American” (1973)

  

  The title track to Kinky’s signature debut album was a straightforward portrait of a faded country star eventually recorded by Lyle Lovett and Glen Campbell. For some period, Friedman later explained, he was frustrated that his heartfelt earlier ballads never earned him the type of attention that his rambunctious and controversial humorous songs did, “but then I just stopped caring.” — J.B.

• “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” (1973)

  

  Kinky Friedman had dozens of stories he loved to tell, none more than the legend of how Nelson Mandela listened to a cassette of Kinky Friedman’s Holocaust ballad (“the smokes from camps are rising,” he sings) each night for three years while in prison on Robben Island. “Although it sounds like something from a Kurt Vonnegut novel,” Friedman once said of the story, “we have now verified it.” Willie Nelson recorded the ballad, and Dylan admired the song Friedman said took “several continents and a decade to write” so much so that he performed it.— J.B.

• “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” (1974)

  

  Told in character from the perspective of small-minded Texans, Kinky’s signature song is an exercise in rabble-rousing provocation for its own sake. Some found it clever, some found it funny, many found it racist (Friedman spends much of the song slinging slurs, dropping the n-word multiple times). Kinky argued it “skewered a false morality,” that the outrage it provoked was his point. This anti-political correctness screed hasn’t aged well at all and stands as an illustrative example of when Kinky’s boundary-pushing didn’t quite stick its landing. — J.B.

• “Jesus in Pajamas” (2018)

  

  All Kinky Friedman needed to write the centerpiece to Circus of Life was to show up at a Denny’s. That’s where he observed the story he tells here: that of an unhoused person asking for money in the middle of the night at a Dallas diner. By the time he arrived back at his hotel 30 minutes after leaving Denny’s, Friedman had written the song. “Help him if you can/Help him if you’re able,” he sings. “When Jesus in pajamas is standing at your table.” — J.B.

• “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You” (1973)

  

  Friedman took a well-known phrase in the service industry and turned it on its head over four verse vignettes. In the first, the narrator is denied a meal over his appearance, while the second finds him kicked out of synagogue for being poor (“We reserve the right to refuse services unto you,” Friedman sings). The other verses are set in Vietnam during the war (military service, you see) and at the threshold of the pearly gates, where the Kinkster’s soul is locked out of heaven: “Our quota’s filled for this year on singing Texas Jews.” — J.H.

• “Rapid City, South Dakota” (1974)

  

  “The first pro-choice country song ever written” is how Kinky often referred to his tender ballad, which rhymes the “her” that the song’s protagonist leaves behind and gets pregnant with Dakoter. Like “Sold American,” “Rapid City” was a portrait in Kinky’s oft-overlooked serious storytelling chops, as evidence further by the moving version of the song Dwight Yoakam released 1999.— J.B.

• “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” (1973)

  

  During a time when male troubadours were eager to display their sensitive sides, Friedman boldly parodied the burgeoning women’s liberation movement and the uber-traditionalist men offended by it. Set to an amiable Western swing arrangement, “Get Your Biscuits…” finds the uptight male narrator complaining about “uppity women” who “try to act like a man” and who’d “better occupy the kitchen, liberate the shrink.” Friedman got his share of blowback, most famously when a group of what he called “cranked-up lesbians” insulted by the song forced one of his 1973 shows to come to a premature end. (That same year, the National Organization for Women nominated the tune for what it called a Keep Her in Her Place award.) Friedman was unfazed: “To me, anybody with an IQ over 30 wouldn’t take the thing to heart.” — D.B.

• “Wild Man From Borneo” (1974)

  

  Friedman wrote the centerpiece to his out-of-print self-titled album after returning home from living in Borneo while in the Peace Corps. “It might be the further you are away from the subject of your song, the more lucid the writing gets,” as he later put it. Further evidence that “Borneo” was one of the most sophisticated pieces of songwriting in Friedman’s career: Guy Clark and James McMurtry both later recorded their own versions. — J.B.

• “A Dog Named Freedom” (2018)

  

  The opening track to Friedman’s 2018 songwriting comeback is an ode to perseverance that name-drops Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, features Mickey Raphael’s signature harmonica, and introduces the more earnest version of Kinky Friedman that the singer-songwriter introduced on Circus of Life. The chorus is a moving portrait of an old man surviving through time with his three-legged dog: “There ain’t no quittin’ in either one of us.” — J.B.

• “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” (1973)

  

  Only Friedman would have the balls to set the tale of the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting to a yee-haw country beat. Does it work? Depends on your comfort level. But Friedman pulls no punches as he tries to figure out what compelled former Marine Charles Whitman to go on a shooting spree from a collegiate crow’s nest. “Most folks couldn’t figure just a-why he did it/And them that could would not admit it,” Friedman sings. Haunting satire. —J.H.