ABOUT THIS BOOK

2022 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music, International Country Music Conference/Belmont University

New and expanded biography of one of country music’s most celebrated singer-songwriters.

Merle Haggard enjoyed numerous artistic and professional triumphs, including more than a hundred country hits (thirty-eight at number one), dozens of studio and live album releases, upwards of ten thousand concerts, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and songs covered by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan.

In The Running Kind, a new edition that expands on his earlier analysis and covers Haggard's death and afterlife as an icon of both old-school and modern country music, David Cantwell takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Covering the breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music: songs that helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” and “Working Man Blues,” among many more), Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions—most of all, the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed—that define not only Haggard’s music and public persona but the very heart of American culture.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Cantwell is the coauthor of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles and the author of the first edition of this book, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (2013). His journalism appears in the New Yorker, Salon, Rolling Stone Country, the Oxford American, and No Depression.

REVIEWS

The Running Kind is the definitive book on Merle Haggard, illuminating the art of country songwriting through the work of one poet with a guitar who both challenged and emboldened aspects of the patriarchy while complicating our understanding of patriotism.

— Alice Randall

A clear, unflinchingly critical, reading of the songs—in Cantwell’s pages they are creative acts, not real, disguised, or fake autobiography—and one that lets the songs go anywhere: from a subtle yet flesh-and-blood class analysis, to an argument against the authenticity argument, to a focus on precisely how a song feels its way into its own skin, its own body (making you always want more…)

— Greil Marcus

In the 2013 iteration of this pioneering book, David Cantwell astutely outlined Merle Haggard's life while giving the artistic legacy that his many albums constitute the detailed attention that legacy deserved. In this expanded revision, he rethinks the story to argue that Haggard wasn't merely a great American singer and songwriter. He was a great American artist—period.

— Robert Christgau

One of the best music books I've read in a long time.

— Dave Marsh

Cantwell captures why Haggard's best-known songs still matter while never shying away from honest critiques of weaker selections that never made it into the classic country canon. Ultimately, this warts-and-all look at a half-century-spanning back catalog gives its subject his due.

— Wide Open Country

Sharp-eyed and sharp-eared insight...abounds in [Cantwell's] book...The Running Kind paints Merle Haggard in a broad and nuanced American cultural landscape, rather than the tight corners that Nixon, the counterculture, country fans, and Haggard himself frequently painted him into.

— New York Journal of Books

If you want to read the definitive book on Merle Haggard, this is the one...The beauty of Cantwell’s book lies in his in-depth, astute, and entertaining close readings of Hag’s songs and the covers of those songs by others, from Dylan to Bobby 'Blue' Bland.

— No Depression

A remarkable book by one of Merle's most astute scholars.

— Lawyers, Guns & Money

In essays on the songs, eras and influences that shaped Haggard’s life and legacy, Cantwell makes a case for Haggard's genius not by leaving out the contradictions that are evident in his work, but by shining a light on them.

— Holler

TABLE OF CONTENTS