The Very Best of Ray Charles (2000)

If you think of the most influential acts in rock music and who in turn inspired them, you'll probably come right back to Ray Charles. It's no mistake that the Beatles' Live at the BBC and Anthology 1 both feature Ray Charles songs almost right off the bat. The Animals even covered the ad hoc "Mess Around" in addition to a number of his core hits. I'd even go so far as to say that if you don't like Ray Charles, there is something wrong with you. He's just so fundamental to everything we listen to now in pop and rock (even if he's not being coarsely sampled by Kayne West) that anyone should find at least something to like about his music. For me anyway it's even more fundamental than what I've grudgingly said about the Eagles in that for Ray Charles it's not just mass popularity but direct artistic influence at work in his music.

This compilation is fairly basic as far as one-disc greatest hits packages go for Ray. You should recognize most of the tracks here ("I Got a Woman", "Hit the Road Jack") as virtual standards of rock and roll even though in original form they are better categorized as true rhythm and blues. There are a couple fun tracks here too like "One Mint Julep" taken from his jazz album, plus the entire "What'd I Say". The last track, a duet with Willie Nelson called "Seven Spanish Angels" is about 20 years removed from the rest of the material here (the previous track "Let's Go Get Stoned" was from 1966), so it doesn't gel particularly well with the rest of the songs. However if your criteria is #1 hits, then that explains the huge gap. Sorry, no "Eleanor Rigby" or "Booty Butt" here.

My copy has a little history to it. The first Borders I worked at had a pretty lousy selection of CD's for overhead music play, so every morning I worked the first thing in the player was this album, since it was the only one in the drawer I could tolerate. When I left that store a few months later, they gave it to me as a going away present. Then I discovered that the speakers were so poorly calibrated in the store that I had only been hearing the songs in one channel! What an introduction to stereo!