Country musician Kinky Friedman has died

American country musician and author Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman is dead, his close friend tells the news agency AP.

Friedman, who died on Wednesday at his home in Texas, was 79 years old and had Parkinson’s disease.

“He died peacefully. He smoked a cigar, went to sleep, and never woke up again”, who has known Friedman for 50 years Kent Perkins told AP.

Kinky Friedman, who called himself a “Jewish cowboy”, became a cult figure in the 1970s with his tongue-in-cheek lyrics and fat western man image.

Friedman was almost always photographed smoking a thick cigar.

He performed in the 1970s Saturday Night Live in the program, Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue on tour and his friends Willie Nelsonin as a warm-up.

In the 1980s, Friedman began writing detective stories, and in the 2000s, he wrote humorous columns for Texas Monthly.

Kinky Friedman was also known in Finland: three of his books have been translated into Finnish, and Freud, Marx, Engels & Jung did There are no more Jews like Jesus –a translated version of his song They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore.

In the year 2006 Friedman ran for governor of Texas as an unattached candidate. He ended up getting 13 percent of the vote.

HS interviewed Friedman in April 2016, when he was about to arrive in Finland to perform for the first time. When speaking to HS, Friedman focused on his typical provocative throws.

Among other things, he complained about the political correctness of our time and joked that he hoped that Bernie Sanders would be elected president because then the “black family [Obamat] would have to move out of the way of a Jewish family for the first time”.

“We need challengers, not average people like Justin Bieber! I appreciate Hunter Thompsonia, Tom Waitsia, Gram Parsonsia, Shel Silversteinia and Warren Zevonia”, Friedman outlined.

His last album Circus of Life appeared in 2018.