Merle Haggard: The Running Kind

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Contents
Introduction: "Silver Wings," Kansas City, Missouri, September 14, 2001
"Hungry Eyes," 1969
The Roots of His Raising
Mama Tried," 1968
Toward the Bad He Kept on Turnin'
He Loves Them So: A Playlist of Early Influences
"Leonard," 1981
The Bakersfield Sound and Fury
Someone Told His Story in a Song
"I Started Loving You Again," 1968
The Legend of Bonnie and Him
"Sing Me Back Home," 1967
He's Living in the Good Old Days
He Likes Living Right and Being Free
"Irma Jackson," 1969
His Fightin' Side
He'd Rather Be Gone
"It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)," 1972
He Wishes He Was Santa Claus
He Takes a Lot of Pride in What He Is (Hint: He's a White Boy)
"A Working Man Can't Get Nowhere Today," 1977
His Country Girl with Hot Pants On
He's Always on a Mountain When He Falls
"Rainbow Stew," 1981
He Wishes a Buck Was Still Silver (Not Really) and Likes the Taste of Yesterday's Wine (Really)
"Kern River," 1985
He's Going Where the Lonely Go
"Me and Crippled Soldiers," 1990
The Hag versus the Man in Black
If He Could Only Fly: Merle Haggard in the Twenty-first Century
Cuba, Missouri, July 15, 2010
Selected Discography
Acknowledgments

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Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. He’s charted more than a hundred country hits, including thirty-eight number ones. He’s released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. In 2011 he was feted as a Kennedy Center Honoree. But until now, no one has taken an in-depth look at his career and body of work.

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. Covering the entire breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music, which helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including songs such as “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” “Working Man Blues,” “Kern River,” “White Line Fever,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “If We Make It through December,” 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.

Reviews

The Running Kind is one of those critical/biographical works that you will want to read again, so prepare yourself to succumb to its charms. It's worth it

An incisive, critical analysis of one of the most complicated and misunderstood artists in country music...Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched

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