Album: Ray Charles

The Definitive Ray Charles, Warner Strategic Marketing/ Rhino

For once, a compilation that lives up to its title. Most Ray Charles retrospectives focus on a particular stage of his career – most profitably the Atlantic years that revolutionised the sound of R&B and arguably invented soul music – but this two-disc set covers the whole Ray, including hits from the epochal "Mess Around" onward.

Rarely have good times sounded as infectious as they do on that carefree track, with Charles's piano pushing along Sam Taylor's honking tenor sax. Recorded at the same May 1953 session, "It Should've Been Me" is a perfect depiction of Charles's appeal, its wry humour conveyed with the abundant good nature that would characterise hits such as "Hit the Road Jack", "What'd I Say" and "Let's Go Get Stoned". His early style was essentially a distillation of blues and gospel into one unified spirit – as illustrated in the hit "I've Got a Woman" – though later on, in the early Sixties, he achieved his greatest international successes through the interest in country music that would spawn hits such as "I Can't Stop Loving You", "You Don't Know Me" and a heartbreaking version of Hank Williams's "Take These Chains from My Heart". All are included on this 46-track anthology, about as mandatory a purchase as you'll see all year.