With 1967’s I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, the spare, tough sound that Merle Haggard had been refining all decade long finally snapped into focus. Compared to the countrypolitan artists of the day—who were pop-friendly and string-oriented—Haggard was a reactionary, stripping away the polish to expose the bones underneath. And if countrypolitan had marked Nashville’s expansion into the broader stream of American music, Haggard represented a retreat to the pre-pop dawn of Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams. Just as rock music continually dies, only to be defibrillated by young purists taking things back to basics, Haggard used I'm a Lonesome Fugitive to remind people what country music had once been: raw, sentimental, out on bail—and a little bit drunk. The title track was Haggard’s first signature song, and its success kicked off one of the most unprecedented runs in music, country or otherwise: 34 Top 10 singles in a row. Haggard’s voice had a pure, brassy quality that made his tough-guy songs believable (“Drink Up and Be Somebody”, “Skid Row”) and his weepy ones even more so (“Whatever Happened to Me”). And in a genre that often divided artists into those who wrote and those who sang, Haggard was also one of modern country’s first singer-songwriters, a designation that eventually helped him catch on with rock-oriented audiences who, post-Dylan, considered him a representative of authenticity and self-reliance. But most of all, Fugitive’s strength is its emotional sleight of hand: Haggard could make the bad times sound good.