Country singer Merle Haggard, diagnosed recently with lung cancer, has undergone surgery to have part of his ill lung removed and is now resting at home, a spokeswoman said on Sunday.

The 71-year-old singer-songwriter sought medical treatment at a Bakersfield, California hospital where part of a lung was removed last Monday. He said in a statement that he now feels “better and better each day” and thanked his wife Theresa for supporting him though the difficult time.

A biopsy had revealed he had non-small cell lung cancer and doctors subsequently removed the upper lobe of his right lung, the statement said. Following tests showed all affected tissue had been removed.

A message posted Nov. 5 on his website by wife Theresa Haggard thanked all the fans who had expressed their care and concern for Merle Haggard through words of support and encouragement and prayers.

The Bakersfield-born artist has been active since the early 1960s. He had a famously troubled youth, as he passed from one juvenile correction center to another as a teenager before receiving a 10-year sentence for robbery in 1957, at the age of 20. He served three years of that sentence in California’s San Quentin State Prison and then turned his life around, focusing on music.

He helped develop the Bakersfield Sound genre of country music in the early 1960s and has been touring and recording ever since. One of his best-known songs is the anti-hippie tune “Okie From Muskogee,” which fared very well on music charts in 1969.

Over the course of his career, Merle Haggard has earned several Academy of Country Music Awards as well as two Grammys, for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1984 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.