(GRAMMY winner Merle Haggard was honored with The Recording Academy's 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award. The following tribute was featured in the 48th GRAMMY Awards program book. Haggard died April 6 at age 79).

From the mid-1960s, in the midst of cultural upheaval, political turmoil, generational strife, and a collective chaos violently accented and darkly punctuated by the accompanying assassination of three of the most prominent leaders in our nation's history, a solitary and uniquely American voice echoed across the continent from what seemed a memory out of a Steinbeck-described "Okie" and "Arkie" workers camp in Central California in the form of a boxcar-born singer named Merle Haggard, who dealt with the love, loss, joy, and longing that co-inhabited the interior of a person whose expression and articulation of human isolation, displacement and societal exclusion had resonance that belied any time and place.

His voice and words were at once so succinctly pure yet racked with an emotion that was so devastatingly honest it defied comparison or categorization. In a cultural and political time that was as unique as any in America's history, Merle Haggard had the most profound poetic impact and far-reaching artistic influence of any singer/songwriter in country music since Hank Williams Sr.

He had no contemporary equal. Without calculation or contrivance he spoke simultaneously from the hearts and minds of individuals who had been left behind as well as those who had done the leaving. He was as hardcore country a singer as any in history yet was continuously courted and begged by network television producers and pop music moguls to accept the idea of letting himself "crossover." He could at once rant and rail for the working man with a strength that equaled Woody Guthrie's, and then spin and backhand you with a fist that seemed thrown from the right. But what Merle Haggard did for me, and no doubt millions of others, was ease the feeling of being a stranger to love and a fugitive from life.

(Dwight Yoakam has won two GRAMMY Awards and has been nominated 18 times. His most recent album is 2015's Second Hand Heart.)