RAY CHARLES
The Complete Country &
Western Recordings: 1959-1986
Rhino

Nearly four decades later, it's hard to imagine just how bold Ray Charles' 1961 album Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music must have sounded to the unsuspecting listener. A country record from the Genius of Soul? You put the needle to the record, hear Charles shout a clipped "Yep," then a breath later feel your head knocked off its shoulders by a fearsome, unexpected blast of screaming brass. You eventually recognize "Bye Bye Love", but it swings like no "Bye Bye Love" you've ever heard – like no country music you've ever heard, in fact. The songs are country, but they've been hijacked by supper-club swing, hot and soulful grooves, swirling strings. "Modern" country? Man, this sounded like the future. And the future of country music, like everything else, was pop.

Pop is Charles' real genius. While his immense reputation, thanks to classic R&B hits such as "What'd I Say" and "I Got A Woman", is built on soul-searching vocals strapped to killer grooves, his knack for sweeping pop arrangements – "Georgia On My Mind" is the obvious example – comprises just as significant a portion of his legacy. Like most American musical innovators, Charles' gift lies in synthesis, in blatant disregard for boundaries. And listening today to Charles' new four-disc, 92-song retrospective The Complete Country & Western Recordings: 1959-1986, we can hear the eclectic pop future he helped invent, one where country and blues, Tin Pan Alley and jazz and gospel, get mixed up together as they search for new sounds and a wider audience.

That country songs were a major part of Charles' pop mix shouldn't have been surprising. Like so many Southerners, Charles grew up loving the Grand Ole Opry, and at 15, when he landed his first professional gig, it was pounding keys for a hillbilly outfit called the Florida Playboys. In 1959, two years before Modern Sounds and a year before Solomon Burke would think to put an R&B spin on "Just Out Of Reach", Charles had already scored with a thundering version of Hank Snow's "I'm Movin On".

So the Modern Sounds LP and its follow-up Volume 2 weren't exactly unpredictable. But they were unexpected. Those two albums, which make up disc one of this new box, have long been heralded for their artistry and influence. Most famous of all, "I Can't Stop Loving You" – already a #7 country hit for its writer, Don Gibson, four years earlier – topped the pop and R&B charts in Charles' aching, soaring-strings version, equal parts Tony Bennett, Nashville Sound and Atlantic soul.

The country compositions Charles recorded in the decade and a half after Modern Sounds are less widely known, but if anything, they're the superior art. Drawn repeatedly over the years to country songwriters with proven pop potential – Gibson, Hank Williams, Fred Rose, Harlan Howard, Jimmy Webb, Boudleaux & Felice Bryant, Floyd Tillman, Jimmie Davis and many more, practically a Who's Who of country songwriting – Charles reinvents standard after country standard on the box's second and third discs, and not merely by investing them with his soulful vocals and brilliant, decidedly un-country phrasing.

The key to these recordings is the stirring, purposeful arrangements, most of which were dictated by Charles himself (even when he wasn't credited) and could routinely feature everything from strings to pedal steel, from flute to fuzztone guitar. He turns Buck Owens' "Love's Gonna Live Here" into a bossa nova, Ted Daffan's "I'm A Fool To Care" into high pop drama, Jack Clement's "A Girl I Used To Know" into the most stirring church-based testifying. Over and over, he turns great country music into great pop music.

How great? Jesus save my soul for admitting such a thing, but I think Brother Ray's "Blue Moon Of Kentucky", "Wichita Lineman" and "Ring Of Fire" all beat the classic original versions. I don't know how to express my admiration for this music any more succinctly.

The final disc and a half of the set is devoted to the more straight-up country Charles made in the late '70s and '80s. Much of this later music – including duets with Willie Nelson ("Seven Spanish Angels") and George Jones ("We Didn't See A Thing") – is quite charming and, despite the occasional presence of producer Billy Sherrill, intensely twangy.

It's Charles' country-inspired pop music, though, that casts the shadow. The late '60s and early '70s hits of Elvis Presley and his many followers, the countrypolitan success of Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich, the lushest of Motown's hits, the velour-soft soul of the Philly sound – all of this and more can be traced, in varying degrees, back to the Modern Sounds albums and the "country music" Charles made in the following decades. They were "modern sounds," all right. And sounds for the ages too.

–DAVID CANTWELL