One of the most distinctive male voices in 20th-century popular music, Roy Orbison enjoyed a prolific career from the 1950s through the ’80s. Not every album or career phase was of equal worth, making a well-curated best-of album an aid to navigating the abundance of material. The Ultimate Collection serves this purpose by covering everything from Orbison’s Sun label rockabilly (“Ooby Dooby”) through his rock hits (“Oh, Pretty Woman”), incomparable pop melodramas (“In Dreams”) and the long patches of country pop before he returned to rock with the Traveling Wilburys (“Not Alone Anymore”). Ultimate Collection isn’t arranged chronologically but sonically, making it less a history lesson than an enjoyable set of songs.
