2022 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music, International Country Music Conference/Belmont University New and expanded biography of one of country musics 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 Haggards 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,