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.