Merle Haggard: The Running Kind

In Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, DAVID CANTWELL takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Taking in the entire breadth of the Hag’s career, David focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s when Haggard created much of his best-known and most influential work. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including such songs as Today I Started Loving You Again, Okie from Muskogee, Sing Me Back Home, Mama Tried, Working Man Blues, and If We Make It through December, among many others), David Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions - the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed, most of all - that define not only Haggard’s music and persona but the very heart of Country music. This book is published by the University of Texas Press as part of their American Music Series. Order the book from them here: http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/canmep

Music critic and longtime Haggard fan, DAVID CANTWELL is also the co-author of the acclaimed Heartaches By The Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles, and his work has appeared in the Oxford American, Salon and No Depression, among other publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.