With his signature cigar always in hand, Kinky uses country music as a platform to inform, amuse and outrage his audience. From the beginning of his career, with his band the Texas Jewboys, Kinky broke out of the stifling, often prejudiced, Nashville mold.

Kinky (who recently ran a much publicized campaign for Governor of Texas) is renowned for his potent brand of country music coupled with outrageous, often comedic lyrics that tackle racism and classism in topics ranging from Jewish cowboys to life in Texas. Selections on Last Of The Jewish Cowboys range from “The Ballad Of Charles Whitman” from the 1973 LP Sold American to “People Who Read People Magazine” from the 2003 LP Under The Double Ego.

Apart from the high-voltage shock quotient, the Friedman formula’s strongest element was Kinky’s genuine reverence for traditional country music, a foundation upon which he erected an unlikely new model — one that has earned him both certain banishment from the Country Music Hall of Fame and a rabid cult of followers that has long since installed him as an idol in misfit’s paradise. And although Music City may not know what to do with him, Kinky is respected by fellow musicians. He’s recorded with Eric Claption, Waylon Jennings and Ringo Starr and was a member of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.