Hollywood couldn't have written it more perfectly. Singer records a tune titled "The Last Song I'm Ever Gonna Sing" only to die soon afterward. In the case of Brownwood, Texas, native "Little" Joe Carson, it's no carefully-crafted dramatic device. The diminutive 27-year-old vocalist perished in a one-car accident in March 1964 after playing a club in Wichita Falls as he basked the glow of his first national hits.
The Carsons of the world, of course, are right up Bear Family's alley. In typical fashion, they've assembled his commercial recordings beginning to end, adding a few rarities and well-researched liner notes by Kevin Coffey.
Carson epitomized the best Texas had to offer. In 1951, he won a talent contest at Bob Wills' ill-fated Fort Worth nightclub, the Ranch House. His intense, charismatic style, rooted in that of shuffle-era Ray Price (and, to a lesser extent, early George Jones), evolved quickly as the teenage honky-tonk prodigy toured with rising stars like Billy Walker.
At 16, he joined guitarist Tommy Allsup's band in Lawton, Oklahoma, and around that same time landed a solo contract with Mercury. The compilation's opening track here, his 1953 recording "I Don't Have A Contract With You", reveals Carson's fledgling gifts as both vocalist and composer. He made no mass inroads with Mercury and fared no better with Capitol (this collection includes his Capitol audition material). Nonetheless, his ease with ballads and novelties such as "I'll Do The Dishes" and the surreal "Hillbilly Band From Mars" portended broader potential.
His rising compositional skills were apparent on an obscure 1959 single for Pappy Daily's D label. Allsup, making his debut as a producer, used his own first-rate band (with Chuck Caldwell's outstanding steel guitar embellishments) behind Carson, whose clever originals "Time Lock" and "Careless Words" reflect maturity both in construction and execution.
Allsup realized his aspirations to produce in the early 1960s when he joined Liberty Records, working under Joe Allison. When Allsup brought Carson to the label, the timing seemed perfect at last. Though he modernized the backing ever so slightly, he accentuated his friend's intense style on garden variety fare such as "Release Me" and "Who Will Buy The Wine", plus two Willie Nelson tunes that later became Willie standards: "I Gotta Get Drunk (And I Shore Do Dread It)" and "Who'll Buy My Memories".
"Drunk" became Carson's first chart hit, followed by "Helpless", which hit the Top 20 early in 1964. Allsup already had enough material for an album. It appeared later that year, titled In Memoriam.
Who knows what could have been for Joe Carson? He might have faded quickly. "Double Life", released the month of his death, only broke the Top 40. It's not inconceivable, however, he might have found wider fame in the mid-'60s as part of the hard-core honky-tonk revival led by Buck and Merle. We can only speculate, but Carson's too-brief career was magnificent indeed.
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