I'm a Lonesome Fugitive is the third studio album by Merle Haggard and the Strangers released on Capitol Records in 1967.

Although it sounds autobiographical (Haggard had done time at San Quentin), David Cantwell states in his book The Running Kind that it was actually written by Liz Anderson and her husband Casey while driving cross country and was inspired by the popular television show The Fugitive starring David Janssen as Richard Kimble.

Haggard felt a connection to the song immediately and when it was released it became his first number one country hit.

"I guess I didn't realize how much the experience at San Quentin did to him, 'cause he never talked about it all that much," Bonnie Owens, Haggard's backup singer, and then-wife, is quoted in the liner notes to the 1994 retrospective, Down Every Road.

[4] Merle can do nothing but sit and wait for phone calls that never come...It's a fantastic album, start to end..." George Bedard of AllMusic praises Haggard's cover of the Jimmie Rodgers classic "Rough and Rowdy Ways," insisting that Haggard "could evoke the Ghosts of Country Past in an absolutely convincing way without nostalgia or imitation.