“Sold American”, “Jesus in Pyjamas”, more

The title track Kinky’s signature debut album was a straightforward portrait of a fading country star that was eventually recorded by Lyle Lovett and Glen Campbell. For a while, Friedman later explained, he was frustrated that his soulful earlier ballads never earned him the attention that his wild and controversial humorous songs enjoyed, “but then I just didn’t care.” — JB

Kinky Friedman had He loved to tell dozens of stories, including the legend of how Nelson Mandela listened to a cassette of Kinky Friedman’s Holocaust ballad every night during his three-year prison stay on Robben Island (“the smoke from the camps rises,” he sings). “Although it sounds like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel,” Friedman once said of the story, “we have it confirmed now.” Willie Nelson recorded the ballad, and Dylan admired the song, which Friedman said “took several continents and a decade to write,” so much that he performed it. — JB

Told in character From the perspective of small-minded Texans, Kinky’s signature song is an exercise in inflammatory provocation for its own sake. Some found it clever, some found it funny, many found it racist (Friedman spends much of the song throwing insults around and dropping the N-word multiple times). Kinky argued that it “skewered a false morality” and the outrage it provoked was his point. This tirade against political correctness has not aged well at all and is a vivid example of when Kinky’s boundary-crossing didn’t quite land. — JB

Everything Kinky Friedman had to write the heart of the matter Circus of Life was to show up at Denny’s. There he observed the story he tells here: that of a homeless man begging for money in a Dallas diner in the middle of the night. By the time he got back to 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 is standing at your table in his pajamas.” — JB

Friedman took a well-known phrase in the service industry and turned it on its head in four verse vignettes. In the first, the narrator is denied a meal because of his appearance, while in the second he is thrown out of the synagogue because he is poor (“We reserve the right to Services “unto you,” Friedman sings.) The other verses are set during the war in Vietnam (military service, you understand) and on the threshold of heaven’s gates, where the kinkster’s soul is barred from heaven: “Our quota for singing Texas Jews is filled for this year.” — JH

“The first pro-choice Country song of all time” – this is how Kinky often described his tender ballad, which rhymes with the “Her” that the protagonist of the song leaves behind and with which she becomes pregnant. DakotaterLike “Sold American,” “Rapid City” was a portrait of Kinky’s often overlooked talent as a serious storyteller, as evidenced by the stirring version of the song that Dwight Yoakam released in 1999. — JB

During a time As male troubadours showcased their sensitive side, Friedman boldly parodied the burgeoning women’s liberation movement And the over-traditionalist men who felt insulted by it. In a sympathetic Western swing arrangement, the uptight male narrator in “Get Your Biscuits…” complains about “snooty women” who “try to act like men” and who “had better occupy the kitchen and free the shrink.” Friedman faced his share of backlash, most famously when a group of what he called “revved-up lesbians” who felt insulted by the song had to end one of his shows early in 1973. (That same year, the National Organization for Women nominated the song for what it called a “Keep Her in Her Place Award.”) Friedman was unimpressed: “For me, no one with an IQ over 30 would take that thing to heart.” — DB

Friedman wrote the The centerpiece of his out-of-print album of the same name after he returned home from his Peace Corps stint in Borneo. “Perhaps the further you get from the subject of the song, the clearer the writing becomes,” he later said. Further proof that “Borneo” was one of the most challenging lyrics of Friedman’s career: Guy Clark and James McMurtry both later recorded their own versions. — JB

The opening track to Friedman’s songwriting comeback in 2018 is an ode to perseverance that mentions Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, features Mickey Raphael’s signature harmonica, and introduces the more serious version of Kinky Friedman that the singer-songwriter performed on Circus of LifeThe chorus is a moving portrait of an old man surviving through time with his three-legged dog: “None of us give up.” — JB

Only Friedman would have the courage to set the story of the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting to a tumultuous country beat. Does it work? Depends on your comfort level. But Friedman doesn’t mince words as he tries to figure out what drove former Marine Charles Whitman to run amok from a college crow’s nest. “Most people couldn’t understand why he did it/And the ones that could, wouldn’t admit it,” Friedman sings. Haunting satire. —JH