This essay was adapted from Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). It is available from the press or directly from me.
Trigger Warning: Intended to offend
CALL ME CRAZY but I was hit as hard by Kinky Friedman’s death as by Guy Clark’s. There was something about him that came from the depths of my generation. Sorry for the cliché, but he’s the last of his kind. And what a kind he was. A generous soul and kind heart, a lover of animals and the downtrodden, but unapologetically against the “wussification” of Texas.
Photo by Jeremy Lock
If Kinky was a young songwriter today, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” would get him banned from every university campus in America, although I’d love to have heard that song blaring from a dorm window at one of the Ivy League schools when the ignorant, self-absorbed protestors were chanting “from the river to the sea” and “go back to Poland.” You have to wonder, along those lines, what would happen if a young, unknown Mel Brooks pitched Blazing Saddles today?
And we don’t have to look far to see what the current take on Kinky’s iconoclasm would be. Rolling Stone once upon a time was one of the most irreverent publications in the country, but today? Jonathan Bernstein clearly thought that Kinky was important enough to rate an obituary in Rolling Stone. And on X, he says “RIP to a true American original.” But in the obituary, Bernstein says this:
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.)
First of all, it’s questionable that Texas is really Southern. And even if it is, no one has been a more diehard Texan than Kinky. So do you sum him up saying he lampooned Southern small-mindedness? Publications like Rolling Stone might sell magazines by talking about Southern small-mindedness (is that just a Southern thing?), but Kinky loved the full range of Texans, even the ones he’s satirizing. He was an equal opportunity lampoonist who took on what he called “false morality” wherever he found it. He’s just as hard on his local synagogue, maybe harder, than he is on the redneck racists.
And he’s just as likely to have a “small-minded” Texan as a sympathetic character as he is to satirize a redneck racist. In that sense, he’s not unlike the less comic great songwriters of Texas. If you don’t feel sympathy for the waitress in “Highway Cafe,” you need counseling. That waitress isn’t a suburban Austinite, and she’s not a reader of Rolling Stone. Kinky’s layered irony is not unlike the Coen brothers tempting you to look down on Sheriff Marge Gunderson in Fargo, but if you do, you’re the one they’re calling out. Great satire demonstrates its success when the ones being satirized don’t get it.
But back to “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” Jonathan Bernstein says of that song: “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).” Just for the record, Friedman does not sling slurs or drop the n-word—the fictional character in his song does. Mel Brooks doesn’t drop the n-word in Blazing Saddles—his made-up characters do. Mark Twain doesn’t drop the n-word in Huckleberry Finn—his characters, echoing the dialect of that time and place, do. And Huck, although guilty of dropping the n-word, decides he would rather burn in hell than betray his friend Jim.
Kinky had a knack for giving the bad guys a voice that is smarter than they would ever come up with themselves, or at least funnier, which, paradoxically, seems to diffuse their power. The racist character in “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews” is like a Texas Archie Bunker.
"You know, you don't look Jewish," he said
"Near as I could figure
I had you lamped for a slightly anemic
Well-dressed country nigger."
Bernstein says of this song that it “stands as an illustrative example of when Kinky’s boundary-pushing didn’t quite stick its landing,” but, no, it did. And now more than when Kinky wrote it, it stands as a monument to how tight-assed smart, educated people can be. Kinky is spoofing racism in a way that is not only hilarious, but so over the top that Rolling Stone writers will be offended. In other words, he’s satirizing the listeners who are offended by the song as much as he is satirizing the racist character in the song.
Kinky knew how bad it had gotten. In a live performance of “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” on his 2012 album Bi-Polar Tour: Live from Woodstock, this is how he introduces the song:
Here’s something that Barbara Jordan, the first black congresswoman from the South, warned us about. She said, even in the 60s I remember Barbara Jordan saying, political correctness would drown America. And I think we’re there. We’ve reached a time that if a young Richard Pryor walked into here tonight we couldn’t make him a big success, not a mainstream star. Same with the young George Carlin or Lenny Bruce or Mel Brooks. Wouldn’t happen today. Certainly we could not make the movie Blazing Saddles in America today. So I at least thank the Lord that we have this song . . .
And then at the end of the song, to balance the high moral ground of the introduction, he says: “You know, folks, ‘Jesus loves you’ can be very comforting words . . . unless you hear them in a Mexican prison.”
Better known nowadays as the author of detective novels and as a tongue-in-cheek candidate for governor, to me the quintessential Kinky Friedman was the prolific songwriter who made an art form of irreverence back in the free-for-all days of the 1970s, starting with the name of his band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. The other members of the band went by Little Jewford, Big Nig, Panama Red, Wichita Culpepper, Sky Cap Adams, Rainbow Colors, and Snakebite Jacobs. He kept writing songs and putting out albums, the last one in 2018, Circus of Life, but for grouchy old men of my generation those early songs are anthems. And those are the ones we need now more than ever. But we also need the gargantuan personality that Kinky brought to the Lone Star State. Life in Texas is not the same without him. With Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Kinky Friedman gone, things are a lot less fun and a lot more contentious than they used to be. Ann Richards said Kinky was “one of Texas’s great natural resources,” and Kinky once said, “Think of me as Ann Richards in drag.”
BUT DOES THE MEL BROOKS of Texas music deserve to stand alongside Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt as a songwriter? He was as good at irreverent satire as they were at the poetic masterpieces they wrote. Perhaps that puts him a notch below them, but why quibble over that? Why not be thankful for both kinds of music?
And it’s worth pointing out that Kinky Friedman also wrote some dead-serious songs that are absolutely stunning. “Sold American” is pure poetry. I’ve been performing this song for probably thirty years. It’s hard to sing it because it’s so profoundly sad. Lyle Lovett does it on Pearls in the Snow, a Kinky Friedman tribute album. That in itself tells you the kind of respect Friedman got as a songwriter. The same irreverent mind that wrote the raunchy satirical lines of “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” put together these beautifully poetic lines in “Sold American”:
Writing down your memoirs on some window in the frost
Roulette eyes reflecting another morning lost
Hauled in by the metro for killing time and pain
With a singing brakeman screaming through your veins
One more example of the serious side of Kinky Friedman is worthy of mention: “Ride ‘Em, Jewboy.” Willie Nelson recorded this song for Pearls in the Snow. On an episode of Charlie LeDuff’s television show The Americans, Friedman tells the story of finding out that Nelson Mandela had listened to this song repeatedly when he was in prison. “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” initially made me feel uncomfortable. Is this somehow disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust? But I finally realized that my discomfort came from trying to see this song as an example of Friedman’s irreverence, when in fact it is a thoroughly serious song of haunting reverence. Now I cannot listen to this song without being deeply moved. You can write it off as a clever but inappropriate translation of disparate cultural symbols, but I don’t. It’s a profound reflection of a thoroughly Texas Jew on the experience of the Holocaust. And, given the resurgence of rabid antisemitism these days, now more on the far left than on the far right, maybe we need this cowboy reminder of the Holocaust:
So ride, ride ‘em jewboy,
Ride ‘em all around the old corral.
I'm, I'm with you boy
If I've got to ride six million miles.
So in honor of Kinky’s passing, put on “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and turn it up so loud that the neighbors will hear it. Or at least recite some of the lyrics to people who will find them offensive. It would have been interesting to have Kinky Friedman as governor, but we’ll always have his music and our memories of a larger-than-life man. So to the one little Hebe in the heart of Texas, the original Texas Jewboy, RIP. May his memory be a blessing.
https://youtu.be/wU-UI4lHjds?si=s0488lGZoWaa4HA9
Got to hear him when he stopped in Granbury on his campaign tour. Quite an experience indeed. Made me think. Made me wonder about a lot of things. Still does, sometimes.