The Very Best of Ed Ames might seem like a skimpy anthology with only 14 tracks, but it is an excellent distillation of this classic pop singer's solo recordings. Ames, having come from the barbershop-style Ames Brothers quartet, offered pop standards, continental pop, show tunes, and adult contemporary music on his solo albums, but his hits were mostly in a contemporary vein. The Very Best of Ed Ames covers most of Ames' big hits and concentrates on broadly appealing material like "My Cup Runneth Over" and the antiwar song "Who Will Answer?" Ames' foray into country music yielded a winner with his version of Jerry Reed's "A Thing Called Love," and a few of the cuts here are in a similar country-pop style. After the success of "Who Will Answer?," Ames attempted other message-oriented songs, like Wally Whyton's "Leave Them a Flower," to which he was not well suited; it would have been better if that track had been omitted in favor of one of his other big easy listening hits like "Timeless Love." Aside from that minor quibble, The Very Best of Ed Ames offers a fine retrospective of the mightiest baritone in pop music. [RCA released this collection only a year after the Taragon label licensed many of the same recordings for a 20-track Ed Ames anthology with the exact same title.]