Biography
Carson Robison earned the nickname “the granddaddy of the hillbillies” among certain listeners, yet he has strangely received less lasting notice than contemporaries such as Vernon Dalhart or later artists like Gene Autry and Merle Travis. Working as a singer, guitarist, whistler, and actor, the breadth of his skills and the early launch of his recording work may have worked against lasting recognition. His father held championships as a fiddler while his mother sang and played piano; by age 14 Robison was already performing guitar for pay. The next year he joined bands as a vocalist, and by his twenties he handled several instruments with ease while also mastering whistling. That skill first brought him into studios, where he supported Dalhart and Wendell Hall. He later joined Dalhart directly, sharing recordings and tours from 1924 through 1928. He also collaborated with the Crowe Brothers and co-wrote “My Blue Ridge Mountain Home” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” with Frank Luther Crowe. Additional partnerships linked him to Gene Austin, Frank Crumit, and Roy Smeck. In 1931 Robison assembled the Pioneers, later renamed the Buckaroos, whose members included John and Bill Mitchell, Frank Novak, and Pearl Pickens. The first country & western ensemble to tour England, they sustained active recording and broadcast schedules both abroad and in America until World War II. Robison scored a 1942 hit with the traditional “Turkey in the Straw” and supplied wartime numbers such as “We’re Gonna Have to Slap That Dirty Little Jap.” As late as 1948 he placed “Life Gits Tee-Jus, Don’t It?” on the charts, and in the year before his death he cut the novelty rock & roll track “Rockin’ and Rollin’ With Grandmaw.” A precise technician with a sharp ear for material, Robison remained too polished to fit neatly among hillbilly or cowboy performers or within country music at large. His work carried a pop gloss that sometimes placed it nearer Bing Crosby or Eddie Cantor, as on “Everybody’s Goin’ but Me,” than Autry, yet it lacked the plain-spoken directness and exceptional vocal blends of the Sons of the Pioneers. Under other conditions he might have supplied film scores, but wider exposure beyond radio never arrived.
Singles
