A Kansas City writer wants you to know why the late country music legend Merle Haggard still...

Kansas City author David Cantwell, who just published a new version of a book he wrote years ago, says Merle Haggard was 'constantly singing about the things that we're still arguing about today.'
Every Saturday when David Cantwell was growing up in South Kansas City, the family took his grandmother to the Safeway at 73rd Street and Prospect Avenue.

That was where, in 1970, Cantwell bought his first record: Edwin Starr's "War."

"Which, through the years, has been kind of a cool thing to be able to say: that my first single was Edwin Starr's 'War,'" he says. "Because it’s a great record, a politically astute record, anti-war — not just anti-Vietnam War but anti-war generally."

But he confesses, the record he actually meant to buy that day was Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me" — whose message to "squirrelly" anti-war Americans is, "if you don't love it, leave it."