Any buyer's guide to Ray Charles records will be problematic because Ray Charles' discography is a monumental mess. The stalwart All Music Guide lists some sixty original albums and 200-plus compilations, and there are more. Charles' forty-one pre-Atlantic tracks have been recycled so relentlessly that in early 2004, twenty labels had interchangeable collections in print.

With his vast post-Atlantic output, there's the opposite problem: scarcity. Among Charles' many innovations is that after 1960 he owned the masters of all his new recordings. A legendary skinflint, Charles set a high price on this work. That's one reason the reissue giant Rhino, part of the same corporation as Atlantic, has leaned heavily on the R&B-jazz Charles of the mid- to late Fifties. In 1998, Rhino released a flawed series of post-Atlantic twofers that lost steam before it passed 1965. The program should resume in 2005. As of now, though, many of Charles' better albums have never reached CD.

There's another problem: Even Charles' better albums were imperfect. In 1960, he started a publishing company called Tangerine Music and all but stopped writing songs, instead collecting royalties on the undistinguished copyrights of his stable. More important, Charles' musical omnivorousness extended well beyond his oft-cited blues-gospel-country-jazz synthesis. Great American that he was, Charles didn't love just the certified roots genres — he loved schmaltz, and he loved schlock. The schmaltz, typified by the serviceable string arrangements of Sid Feller, he often transformed. The schlock, embodied by big bands and choral backup, could be ruinous. Sometimes the bands are solid jazz and the choruses acceptable schmaltz, and either can provide punch. But they blast or swamp too many tracks into the wide blue yonder or the briny deep.

Because Charles remains both seminal and enjoyable, however, his gaffes have their own charm, especially alongside his strokes of, as the saying goes, genius. Bless him for never making a gospel album. And understand that any map of his oeuvre must be personal and provisional.

That said, there's one clear reference point, a monument visible from a mile away: 1997's five-CD, 102-track Genius and Soul: The 50th Anniversary Collection (Rhino), selected in part by Brother Ray himself, reportedly upon the occasion of a seven-figure advance. G&S stands astride all of Charles' work, testifying noisily to his continuing vitality. Of course preferences vary. Of course there are classics passed by ("Mess Around") and rarities that deserve nothing better ("The Cincinnati Kid"). But embrace his all-embracing aesthetic and you'll agree that, as seldom happens with these megaboxes, the final CD is a worthy companion to the first - that in fact Leon Russell's "A Song for You" and Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," which end it, are more typical and just plain better than Ray's own "Confession Blues" and "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand," which begin it. (Budget alternative: Rhino's two-CD Ultimate Hits Collection, which includes "Mess Around.")

If you crave Charles' early sides, you've got some blues scholar in you, so spring for the neat, complete, well-annotated Birth of a Legend 1949-1952 double (Ebony). The piano pleases, the singing develops and the songwriting tops out with the jocose "Kissa Me Baby." Soon he'll flower. But Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown worked the same lounge-trio vein with far more flair. (Budget alternative: The Early Years, on King.) In full bloom is The Birth of Soul: The Complete Atlantic Rhythm & Blues Recordings, 1952-1959 (Atlantic). As product, the three-CD, 151-minute box comes with caveats. As listening, it's the rockingest Charles long-form you can buy. Although Charles' fabled blues-gospel synthesis is on display from "I Got a Woman" to "I Believe to My Soul," "birth of soul" gets the emphasis wrong. Seldom conventionally catchy, this Robert Palmer-annotated collection epitomizes a world-historic catchall of a genre that Charles could only describe as "genuine down-to-earth Negro music" — namely, rhythm & blues. Crack bands, first Atlantic's and then his own, underpin his rich, gravelly vocals with hard-hitting grooves of deceptive rhythmic and harmonic complexity. Halfway in, a female backup group soon to be known as the Raeletts starts shoring up his male voice and egging it on, an innovation that became a cliche so fast people think it was always there. (Budget alternative: Rhino's The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years.)

The caveats are economic. Not only would the three CDs fit onto two, but twenty of the fifty-one songs — the catchiest, natch — repeat on G&S. And eighteen, including four also on G&S, appear on the astute Blues + Jazz twofer (Rhino). Jazz chops helped define Charles' singular pop identity, and he both articulated and stimulated an appetite for "soul jazz." He was a tastier soloist than vamp merchants such as Les McCann. But a pantheon jazzman he was not, and only vibraphone connoisseurs will want all of his renowned Milt Jackson collaborations (available in toto as Soul Brothers/Soul Meeting, on Rhino). Highlighting combo interactions far from the big-band bombast of its dreadful opposite number, Genius + Soul = Jazz/My Kind of Jazz, Blues + Jazz's artfully configured jazz disc includes sessions led by Charles' longtime saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman, who did more with his jazz concept than its inventor. Charles even plays alto sax on a few cuts — damn well, for a few cuts. Redundant or not, the blues disc goes down just as smooth, epitomizing a perfect mix of down-home and citified the way the jazz one does a perfect mix of unintellectual and uncorny. Throw up your hands and buy a bunch of songs twice (or thrice).

Buy both volumes of the legendary Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music and you'll duplicate seven more. Unfortunately, you can't — not both, not on CD, not without investing in songs you don't want once. The two Modern Sounds albums occupy Disc One of the four-CD Complete Country & Western Recordings 1959-1986. The remainder of the box comprises G&S desirables from the Atlantic Hank Snow cover "I'm Movin' On" to the Columbia George Jones collab "We Didn't See a Thing"; dubious follow-up country LPs; and uneven product from Charles' Nashville foray on Columbia in the Eighties, including the not-bad-at-all duet album Friendship (available from Columbia as Ray Charles and Friends' Super Hits), where Ricky Skaggs and Hank Williams Jr. attain glories beyond the reach of the Oak Ridge Boys. Inevitably, the box also features magnificent obscurities: bluesified "Ring of Fire"; George Jones-worthy "A Girl I Used to Know"; hee-hawing "3/4 Time" — all buried so deep they deserve a downloading.