After the run he had in the 1960s and 1970s, it would’ve been enough for Merle Haggard to excuse himself and retire. Not only was 1981’s Big City his fourth album in a year and a half, it turned out to be one of the best of Haggard’s five-decade career. The convicts and sinners that dominated his early music had settled down, but still found themselves fundamentally at odds with the world, which they found too fast (“Stop the World and Let Me Off”), too dirty (“Big City”), and too generally devoid of heart (“Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver)”). Were they cranky? Yes—at times, Big City sounds like a catalog of grievances issued by a committee of stubborn uncles. But like stubborn uncles, there’s something lovable about them. Or, if not lovable, at least laughable. Really, what else can you do with someone who takes a moral stance against highways (“Good Old American Guest”)? And while it might not soften you to learn that these Big City dwellers spend most of their time reliving the past (“My Favorite Memory,” “I Always Get Lucky With You”), it might give you a clue into where they’re coming from. The cliché when it came to someone as successful as Haggard is that, by the early 1980s, he’d have nowhere to go but down. With Big City, Haggard and his characters found another way: forward.