Der Bingle said it best:
Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest of them all.
According to my music server, I appear to own 1,132 albums by 457 artists encompassing 14,733 songs. If I had to choose only a fraction of my music to take with me on a desert island, at or near the top of the list would be The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books box set.
The set consists of sixteen (16!!!) discs containing 251 songs, spanning nearly a decade of recordings starting in 1956 (all remastered, of course, with extras). It covers the oeuvres of Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. Some fellas who knew how to write a song or two 
. The set also contains meaty texts on the recordings and historical contexts.
Although the price is in nosebleed territory, consider that it works out to just about the same as iTunes pricing per song, and you the stupendous packaging and documents for free!
