Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song
2. No Place For Me
3. Man With The Blues
4. Nite Life
5. Hello Walls
6. Funny How Time Slips Away
7. Crazy
8. Half A Man
9. Mr. Record Man
10. One In A Row
11. The Party's Over
12. Texas In My Soul
13. Good Times
14. Sweet Memories
15. Little Things
16. Any Old Arms Won't Do
17. Everybody's Talkin'
18. Pins And Needles (In My Heart)
19. Once More With Feeling
20. I Gotta Get Drunk
21. Laying My Burdens Down
22. What Can You Do To Me Now
23. Kneel At The Feet Of Jesus
24. I'm A Memory
25. Family Bible
26. Summer Of Roses
27. Yesterday's Wine
28. Me And Paul
29. The Words Don't Fit The Picture

Disc 2:

1. Good Hearted Woman (Waylon & Willie)
2. You Left A Long, Long Time Ago
3. She's Not For You
4. You Ought To Hear Me Cry
5. It Should Be Easier Now
6. Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys (Waylon & Willie)
7. If You Can Touch Her At All (Waylon & Willie)
8. I Can Get Off On You (Waylon & Willie)
9. Blackjack County Chain
10. Johnny One Time
11. Bring Me Sunshine
12. I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye
13. Shotgun Willie
14. Sad Songs And Waltzes
15. The Troublemaker
16. Uncloudy Day
17. Bloody Mary Morning
18. I Still Can't Believe You're Gone
19. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain
20. I'd Have To Be Crazy
21. If You've Got The Money I've Got The Time
22. Always Late (With Your Kisses)
23. She's Gone, Gone, Gone
24. I Never Go Around Mirrors
25. Stardust
26. Georgia On My Mind
27. A Song For You (Live)

Disc 3:

1. Whiskey River (Live)
2. Till I Gain Control Again (Live)
3. Stay A Little Longer (Live)
4. Heartbreak Hotel
5. One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)
6. Help Me Make It Through The Night
7. Midnight Rider
8. My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
9. Crazy Arms (with Ray Price)
10. On The Road Again
11. Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground
12. Mona Lisa
13. I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter
14. Always On My Mind
15. Old Friends (with Roger Miller and Ray Price)
16. Pancho & Lefty (with Merle Haggard)
17. Reasons To Quit (with Merle Haggard)
18. In The Jailhouse Now (with Webb Pierce)
19. Why Do I Have To Choose (with Waylon Jennings)
20. City Of New Orleans
21. To All The Girls I've Loved Before (with Julio Iglesias)
22. Three Days (with Faron Young)
23. Touch Me (with Faron Young)

Disc 4:

1. Write Your Own Songs
2. Heart Of Gold
3. I'm Movin' On (with Hank Snow)
4. Seven Spanish Angels (with Ray Charles)
5. Highwayman (with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson)
6. Living In The Promiseland
7. What A Wonderful World
8. Country Willie
9. Graceland
10. Valentine
11. What Was It You Wanted
12. Still Is Still Moving To Me
13. Too Sick To Pray
14. Everywhere I Go
15. My Own Peculiar Way
16. Nuages
17. Rainbow Connection
18. Mendocino County Line (with Lee Ann Womack)
19. The Harder They Come
20. Bubbles In My Beer
21. When I've Sung My Last Hillbilly Song

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5609 in Music
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2008-04-01
• Number of discs: 4
• Formats: Box set, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .83 pounds

Features

• Hitch a ride through Willie Nelson?s storied career ? from 1954 to 2008! This gorgeous collector?s box set contains all of his best-known recordings. ? M02115

Album Description
This box contains a wealth of American music, plus a couple of jewels--Django Reinhardt's "Nuages" and Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come"--from beyond these shores. Here are 100 songs commemorating Willie Nelson's incredible journey by going full circle. "When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song," leading off Disc One, was recorded in 1954 or '55; it is reprised on Disc Four's final track, updated in 2007. Between those years Nelson, a Depression era kid who grew up dirt poor in Abbott, Texas, became one of the world's most recognizable figures, in the music/entertainment business or otherwise. One Hell Of A Ride is, quite simply, the most all-encompassing Nelson retrospective ever assembled.

In addition to all of its glorious music, this package also features incisive words in an essay by Nelson's biographer, Joe Nick Patoski, whose Willie Nelson: An Epic Life was published in 2008. There's also a brief reminiscence by Mickey Raphael, Nelson's longtime harmonica player, that is funny and affecting.

Finally, there is the man himself, who on April 30, 2008 turned 75. The songs herein, many of them touchstones, some lesser known gems, reflect the musical sense and sensibility of an artist for all ages, and for the ages.

Customer Reviews

Great collection, but once again...frustrating
Let me start by saying that I'm a big Willie Nelson fan, and I hate docking this collection a star. It's not because the material on this set isn't first-rate. On the contrary; everything here is classic. Even some of the lesser-known and/or second-tier songs would be career highlights for most artists. But the problem with this set is the same problem suffered by every Willie Nelson compilation released so far: what's missing from it.

There are several good Willie Nelson compilations on the market right now: the classic (and recently remastered) "Greatest Hits (and Some That Will Be)," the boxed set "Revolutions of Time," and two compilations both called "Essential Willie Nelson" (one a single-disc covering his early years and the other a recent double-disc covering his entire career). While all of these collections are great, none is truly comprehensive. I was really hoping that this would finally be the collection that "got it right," but once again, we're given a Willie Nelson compilation that is frustratingly incomplete.

Scanning the titles on this box, I noticed that some of my favorites were missing. So, I went back to the four previously-mentioned collections, all of which I own, and I made a list of the songs that were included on one or more of those collections but are missing here. Some omissions were major, some minor; but it was surprising just how many true classics were M.I.A. Need proof? Take a quick look at the list below, and see how many of your favorite Willie Nelson songs are on it:

Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning
All of Me
Blue Skies
Faded Love (w/ Ray Price)
Forgiving You Was Easy
I Never Cared For You
Railroad Lady
Heartaches of a Fool
Look What Thoughts Can Do
Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming)
Midnight Rider
December Day
Healing Hands of Time
Darkness on the Face of the Earth
My Own Peculiar Way
Waltz Across Texas
Some Other World
Phases & Stages (Circles, Cycles and Scenes)
Time of the Preacher
It's Not Supposed to Be That Way
Summertime
Everything Is Beautiful (In It's Own Way)
Take It To the Limit
How Do You Feel About Foolin' Around?
I'm Movin' On
Slow Movin' Outlaw
Are There Any More Real Cowboys?
They All Went to Mexico
Texas On a Saturday Night
Heartland
Nobody Slides, My Friend
Little Old Fashioned Karma
Harbor Lights
Without a Song
Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues
Who'll Buy My Memories?
When I Dream
There Is No Easy Way (But There's a Way)
Ole Buttermilk Sky
A Horse Called Music
Nothing I Can Do About It Now
Is the Better Part Over?
Ain't Necessarily So

Kind of shocking. If you're a Willie Nelson fan, you probably found a good disc's worth of must-have classics, and that's my point. Why didn't they make this set a five-disc box and include all of the classics in his catalog? Then, anyone looking for a primer to Willie's career would have the entire canon available for a single purchase.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a great collection on its own merits, and it is still probably the best place to start for any newcomer. It's also a good compilation, even if you have all of the previously mentioned sets, because it does a great job of finding classic rarities and lesser-known gems. It also does an excellent job of summing up the later part of Willie's career, which has been, honestly, pretty uneven. But as a complete career overview, it's still disappointing.

If you don't own anything by Willie Nelson, I would advise you to buy this set first, but just realize that there's still a lot of great material out there. In addition to the previous song list, there are several albums that are classics in and of themselves ("Yesterday's Wine," "Shotgun Willie," "Phases & Stages," "Red Headed Stranger," "Stardust," and latter-day cult classic "Spirit" being possibly the most essential ones). Maybe one day somebody will get it right. And who knows? If Willie Nelson has a late-career renaissance like Bob Dylan, maybe by then it will need a sixth disc. For right now, though, this will have to do.

Stop The Nit Pickin'
Come on stop nit pickin'. Seems like everyone has his or her favorite song that's not included on this collection. The problem is Willie has been so prolific for the past twenty five years, that it would be impossible to satisfy everyone even if they had made this a five or six disc collection. All I know is this is a great collection and I'm delighted to find one hundred of Willie's greatest songs all in one collection.

With that said I would like to see a few of Willie's great albums like "Angel Eyes", "Without A Song", "Islands In The Sea" and the "Songwriter" soundtrack (with Kris Kristofferson) reissued. Or maybe Atlantic Records would have the good sense to reissue their terrific three disc collection "Classic & Unreleased". Then again I guess that's a bit of nit pickin' on my part.

A worthy box set for Willie's 75th anniversary
To be sure, there's no shortage of Willie Nelson best-ofs out there, but this far-flung 4-CD set is a real doozy. It draws on Willie's work from a number of labels, including former rivals RCA and Columbia (now both part of Sony-BMG) as well as early '60s recordings on Liberty (owned by EMI), a couple of tracks from his lone mid-period album for Atlantic and various offerings on Universal over the last ten years.

It's a fitting tribute to Nelson, a prolific trendsetter and stubborn iconoclast whose seventy-fifth birthday coincides with the album's release. The collection starts out with a prehistoric demo that Willie made around 1954 or '55, back before his early success as the songwriter of hits such as "Crazy" and "Nite Life..." Even back then, working in the real hillbilly days when Nashville was only beginning to consolidate its power as the center of a new country music industry, Willie had an odd, exceptional air about him. His phrasing was already a little bit weird and his sense of rhythm was kinda cock-eyed. This collection moves from early hillbilly gems such as "No Place For Me" (an indie single that Willie self-released back in 1957), into his early work for RCA, a period that yields several off-the-radar gems, even though Nelson found the Nashville studio system creatively frustrating...

The playlists of this four CD set are not organized in strictly chronological order -- there's a much-welcomed, intelligently thought-out aesthetic at play, which can pair a song from one era with another that compliments it in interesting ways. The big hits are there (although not all of them) but they are sandwiched between less well-known material that more fully illuminates Nelson's creative trajectories. After the "outlaw" era, Discs Three and Four take us into Willie's years of superstardom, and his long run of reinterpreting old standards and teaming up with old pals and heroes, first on a series of duet albums, and then on the Highwaymen records. It's all dutifully sampled, although nothing touches the transcendent beauty of "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain," which is one of the most brilliant works of country revivalism, and possibly Nelson's finest moment as a song stylist: even with all the other great songs included here, that's the one song that I find myself playing over and over again, even after all these years.

The packaging is pretty cool, too -- it's eco-friendly, with soft cardboard slipcases instead of plastic trays, so it may feel a little unusual at first... But the real treat is the glossy booklet, which has a wealth of super-groovy photographs taken at all stages of Nelson's career, as well as pictures of all of his LPs ever released, which is also pretty neat.

Happy Birthday, Willie!! Thanks for all the great gifts! (DJ Joe Sixpack, Slipcue Music Reviews)