Although Carl Belew issued eight albums from 1960 to 1972, his lasting reputation centers on his songwriting, which drew covers from a wide range of performers such as Patsy Cline, Gene Vincent, and Andy Williams. An Oklahoma native born in 1931, he first entered the recording studio in 1955 and secured wider attention the following year through guest spots on the California radio programs Town Hall Party and The Cliffie Stone Show; in 1957 he appeared on the Louisiana Hayride.
Johnnie & Jack took Belew’s “Stop the World (And Let Me Off)” into the Top Ten during 1958, while Andy Williams reached the Top Five the next year with “Lonely Street,” a composition that became Belew’s signature number after later versions by Cline, Vincent, and Rex Allen, Jr. Still in 1959, he penned “Am I That Easy to Forget,” which actress Debbie Reynolds carried to a Top 40 pop placement and which Engelbert Humperdinck, Skeeter Davis, Don Gibson, Jim Reeves, and Leon Russell subsequently recorded; Belew’s own reading climbed to the Top Ten that same year.
His self-titled debut LP appeared in 1960, the year he also scored a Top 20 single with “Too Much to Lose.” A label shift two years later yielded another album under his own name, highlighted by the Top Ten entry “Hello Out There,” his final chart success of that magnitude. From 1964 through 1968 he released one album annually—Hello Out There, Am I That Easy to Forget?, Country Songs, Lonely Street, and Twelve Shades of Belew—before issuing the 1972 duet collection When My Baby Sings His Song with Betty Jean Robinson; his last single, “Welcome Back to My World,” surfaced in 1974.
Belew’s material remained in demand among other vocalists: Eddy Arnold topped the charts in 1965 with “What’s He Doing in My World,” and Jim Reeves enjoyed a posthumous hit in 1968 with “That’s When I See the Blues (In Your Pretty Brown Eyes).” “Stop the World (And Let Me Off)” reentered the Top 20 via Waylon Jennings in 1965 and Susan Raye in 1974. Belew succumbed to cancer on Halloween 1990 at age 59.
