Next to Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson is arguably the most anthologized artist in country music history. Even before 1975, when The Red Headed Stranger made icons of his braids and beard, Nelson had already toiled as a songwriter and performer for more than 20 years, long enough to release his first greatest hits compilation just a few years before his greatest hit. In the 30-plus years since that benchmark album, Nelson has interspersed his prolific new recordings (often two full albums a year) with a steady stream of hits repackagings. Most of his recent albums have consisted of new recordings of old material, which reinforces the impression of an artist constantly taking stock of his career, his life, and his legacy.

It seems strange that with so many compilations on the market, so few of them even attempt to take in the full half-century breadth of Nelson's career. Granted, capturing such a wide-ranging, musically omnivorous artist in a limited space is always a daunting task, especially when affordability is a concern. In 1995, Willie released the 3xCD Revolutions of Time: The Journey 1975-1993, whose subtitle is revealing: Far from comprehensive, the set ignores his pre-Stranger output, including early hits like "Shotgun Willie", "Crazy", and "Bloody Mary Morning", in order to document his post-fame highlights. Two more recent retrospectives, the 41-track Essential Willie Nelson in 2003 and the 20-track Songs in 2005, take a wider view of Nelson's canon, but are necessarily hampered by their cursory tracklists.

In Nelson's case, quantity ensures quality, which means that One Hell of a Ride is so far the best Willie retrospective by simple virtue of its size. Across 100 tracks on four CDs, the handsomely packaged set, which commemorates Nelson's 75th birthday, traces his career from his first known recording in 1954 to one of his most recent tracks in 2007. That they're both the same composition-- "When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song"-- provides a nice symmetry, bookending all the hillbilly songs that came in between.

One Hell of a Ride culls a full disc from Nelson's work in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, representing early albums like ...And Then I Wrote and Texas in My Soul, which are sadly out of print, as well as slightly more popular releases like Shotgun Willie and Phases & Stages (reissued in 2006 as The Complete Atlantic Sessions). After Willie released Stranger, the various labels he had recorded for began cleaning out the vaults, repackaging his older hits and selling them to new fans, and this set draws liberally from some of these reissues: three tracks from Willie-- Before His Time, a 1977 release of tracks from the previous decade (remixed by Waylon Jennings); one each from 1980's Minstrel Man and 1984's Don't You Ever Get Tired; and two from his All Time Greatest Hits Vol. 1. By comparison, Stranger itself gets only one track, Stardust two.

This is significant. Nelson lives and dies by the song, whether he wrote it himself or is just covering it. With compositions like "Crazy", "Sad Songs and Waltzes", "Bloody Mary Morning", "Too Sick to Pray", and many others, One Hell of a Ride showcases Nelson's unparalleled songwriting skills, but with covers of compositions by Jimmy Cliff, Hoagy Carmichael, Bob Wills, Paul Simon, Fred Neil, and the Muppets, the set highlights his intuitive interpretive skills. Despite the decades in between, the leathery texture of his voice is immediately recognizable on the first disc as it is on the final disc, as idiosyncratic as Cash's grave baritone or Elvis Presley's full-bodied croon, and his behind-the-beat cadence, which draws from jazz and gospel as heavily as from country, makes every performance singular.

In tandem with taking stock of his well-known hits like "Whiskey River", "Night Life", and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain", One Hell of a Ride pays particular attention to Nelson's many collaborations, the number of which suggests he might have been contractually obligated to sing with anyone who stepped within the Nashville city limits. The second disc kicks off with the first of five duets with Waylon Jennings, "Good Hearted Woman", from Wanted! The Outlaws, which not only helped popularize outlaw country but was for many years the best-selling country album ever. But the collaborators on One Hell of a Ride are admirably diverse: old timers like the Highwaymen (Cash, Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson) and Rays Price and Charles rub elbows with Lee Ann Womack, Leon Russell, Daniel Lanois, and even Julio Iglesias, on the gloriously cheesy "To All the Girls I've Loved Before". This emphasis on his friends means the third and fourth discs nearly lose Willie in the crowd, but it barely matters. One Hell of a Ride is perhaps the first Willie retrospective to portray him not simply as the famous long-haired singer-songwriter who penned hits and dodged the IRS, but as something more complex: an American artist who spent decades struggling in the country music industry, then spent decades redefining it.