Merle Haggard turned in one of his finest efforts to date in 1969's Pride in What I Am. While there are no flat-out classics outside of "I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am" -- it's the only track on the album here that was a hit -- the album is certainly not lacking in strong material. In fact, it gains considerable strength from a diversity of material, where the rolling, folk-tinged sound epitomized by the title song is balanced by twangy, spare country and bits of hard honky tonk, blues, and cowboy, not to mention the slyly inventive arrangement on his version of Lefty Frizzell 's "It Meant Goodbye to Me When You Said Hello to Him." There are also hints of the direction Hag would take in the near future, including a Jimmie Rodgers song (his tribute to the singing brakeman