The newest edition drops on November 21st
Founded by Ray Charles in the 1960s, Tangerine Records is proud to celebrate the 17-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and pianist’s singular legacy with the Tangerine Master Series, a new slate of reissues highlighting Charles’ best-known music alongside classic records long out of print, and ready for rediscovery. Each album has been restored and remastered under the direct supervision of The Ray Charles Foundation, painting a vivid new portrait of an artist and icon whose impact continues to expand and inspire.
The Tangerine Master Series now presents No One Does It Like…Ray Charles! collecting for the first time several mid-1960s singles, B-sides, and non-LP tracks never before gathered together on a single cohesive album. The instant classic collection captures Ray Charles at the height of his powers, offering a rare glimpse into a prolific and creatively explosive moment in his career. Tracks like “My Baby Don’t Dig Me,” “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” “Worried Life Blues,” and a top 10 rendition of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s classic “No One” showcase his unmatched range and soul. An essential addition to the Ray Charles canon and a snapshot of an artist at the peak of his creative brilliance, No One Does It Like…Ray Charles! arrives everywhere on Friday, November 21st.
“A discography can define legacy, it can define a tenure of greatness, but to appreciate the gifts of Ray Charles, one has to avoid taking such a wide-lens approach, which is a way of saying that each Ray Charles song is a universe,” writes award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib in an exclusive essay penned expressly for this new release. No One Does It Like…Ray Charles! is an offering which makes that plain….All of the songs on this album existed, somewhere, before this, stretched out alongside the massive career of Ray Charles. But this is the first time they’ve been curated and organized in one single place. Before this, these songs existed primarily as scattered singles or one-off bonus tracks, but they all came out of an Era where Charles was at his best, a 1960s run where he showcased his brilliance, and his range, and also a decade where he was at his most prolific, releasing multiple albums every year. Because of this, it can feel like we have all heard Charles at the highest level, we have witnessed and dissected his greatness, and we have the massive run of albums to prove it all.
“To listen through this body of work is to hear what I think is Ray Charles at the height of his powers, specifically as a singer. Attacking each note in each song until he can wring everything out of it. To put it another way, this is Ray Charles at the height of his power of feeling. It is easy to look at these specific songs and say Ray Charles had the blues, but the blues are a primary color. In order for them to become touchable, in order for them to actually live outside of the body, they have to be intertwined with other colors. The blues are made up of many parts: longing, fear, desire. I love a singer who can show you how the paint is mixed.”
No One Does It Like…Ray Charles! marks the latest installment in the ongoing Tangerine Master Series, following the arrival earlier this month of 1970s out-of-print classic Love Country Style, available everywhere now for the first time since its original release. A fan favorite that’s one of the finest examples of Charles’ crossover work, Love Country Style is the most soulful of his country records, as well as arguably the album that’s the most connected to the current sound of today’s country superstars. The album finds Charles once again embracing his love for the genre by delivering heartfelt renditions of songs by Mickey Newbury and Jimmy Webb with his signature blend of soul and sophistication. Backed by lush gospel-tinged arrangements, songs like his iconic version of “Ring of Fire” and “Don’t Change On Me” (which hit the top 20 at R&B as well as the overall top 40) highlight Charles’s unrivaled ability to transform country standards into something unmistakably his own. Out of print since its original release more than 50 years ago, Love Country Style now finally returns, fully restored and remastered in cooperation with the Ray Charles Foundation.
The Tangerine Master Series also includes a long-overdue reissue of 1963’s milestone Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul, available now digitally, on CD, and on vinyl for the first time in more than half a century. A top 10 stew of jazz, soul, and pop standards highlighted by the Grammy Award-winning, top 5 hit, “Busted,” this is the first and only legitimate reissue of this essential album on vinyl – as well as its first appearance on CD since the 1990s.
In turn, a newly remastered Tangerine Master Series edition of 1974’s, a blend of pop and gospel-infused soul that sees Charles demonstrating his unmatched versatility available now at all DSPs, on CD, and on vinyl for the first time in over 50 years.
In the early ’60s, just one pop hit – the revolutionary “What’d I Say” – into his career, Ray Charles realized he’d outgrown the traditional music business. Risking everything to secure his creative and financial independence, he negotiated a deal that would reshape the industry, granting him full control and ownership of his recordings and the means to build his own publishing company, recording studio, and business offices. Recording what he wanted, when he wanted, Ray Charles would answer to nobody but himself. This is where the story of Tangerine Records begins, created by Ray Charles to achieve greatness on his own terms, and the label that remains the only authorized home of some of his greatest works.
As a truly independent artist with the freedom to trust his taste and the talent to back it up, Ray Charles summed up his own A&R strategy simply: “If I like it, I’m gonna sing it.” The result is an oeuvre that boldly defies categorization, rewarding open ears and curious minds. With decades of hindsight, the consistently staggering quality of the music Charles made on Tangerine Records becomes far more obvious than it ever was to critics trying to make real-time sense of an artist who had no concerns for fleeting trends or nostalgic expectations. That means for every iconic song, for every classic album, there are a dozen revelations just waiting to be heard, each crafted with as much care and delivered with as much soul as the immortal Ray Charles hits that continue to be passed across generations and around the world.
- My Baby Don’t Dig Me
- Without Love
- The Brightest Smile in Town
- Hide Nor Hair
- My Baby (I Love Her, Yes I Do)
- No One
- Don’t Set Me Free
- Something’s Wrong
- At the Club
- Worried Life Blues (Someday Baby)
- Who You Gonna Love
- My Heart Cries For You
