Wish You Were Here Tonight

Wish You Were Here Tonight is a studio album by Ray Charles, released in 1983 on Columbia Records and produced by Ray Charles and Joe Adams, a country-oriented album that returned Charles to the genre with which he had achieved his greatest commercial success in the early 1960s, with arrangements that were closer to the Nashville Sound mainstream than the orchestrated soul-country hybrid of the Modern Sounds volumes. Charles wrote or co-wrote several tracks; the album's material includes 'Makin' Whoopee,' 'I Wish You Were Here Tonight,' 'String Bean,' and 'We Didn't See a Thing' (a duet with George Jones). The George Jones collaboration represents one of the more significant artist pairings of the album, two of the defining voices of American country and soul, sharing the same material with the mutual respect that comes from acknowledged mastery in related traditions. The album reached the top twenty on the Billboard Country Albums chart, demonstrating that Charles's country audience had remained commercially active across the two decades since Modern Sounds. Wish You Were Here Tonight reflects the sustained commercial viability of Charles's country presence and the continuing relevance of the Modern Sounds crossover as a model for how his music was received.