A reassessment of the career of 1950s-60s honky-tonk singer Little Joe Carson has long been overdue. Joe Carson died at 27 following an automobile accident in 1964, just as he was starting to have major chart success with songs like I Gotta Get Drunk (And I Shore Do Dread It) and Helpless. For that reason, he's largely forgotten today. But he was one of the best country singers of his era and could have been one of the best of any era had he lived long enough. - From the first notes he sang on record, at age sixteen on his own remarkably assured song I Don't Have A Contract With You, to his last recording, a moving dead-perfect rendering of the standard Fraulein, Joe Carson had an indefinable something that set him apart from most others. Pitifully little of his legacy has been reissued over the years. Bear Family has remedied that at last with this collection, which gathers all of Joe Carson's commercial recordings from 1953 to his death ten years later. It includes not only every commercial release, for Mercury, Capitol, D and Liberty, but also includes an unissued master from his final session and several songs he cut as an audition prior to signing to Capitol in 1956.