One of Friedman’s most poignant and beloved songs, “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” is a tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. Friedman wrote it while abroad with the Peace Corps in Borneo, a time he said gave him a lot of perspective on the United States.

According to Friedman, the song was a favorite of Nelson Mandela, who reportedly listened to a recording of it on a smuggled cassette every night in his cell while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Friedman said that creating something that reached Mandela was his “greatest accomplishment.”

The irreverent use of “Jewboy” in the title was signature Kinky Friedman — it was a term he encountered a lot as one of the few Jews in the heavily Christian state of Texas, and he liked to self-apply it as both self-deprecation and provocation.

“The “Jewboy” thing kept us out of a lot of record-store chains and record-company deals,”
he told The A.V. Club.