Joe Carr

Joseph Allen Carr was born on 22 June 1951 and grew up in Denton. He taught himself, starting with folk music on guitar at thirteen and adding the mandolin at fifteen, and moved on to old-time and bluegrass music; in the 1970s he played with the Texas band Roanoke.

In 1978 he joined Country Gazette on guitar, with Roland White on mandolin, Alan Munde on banjo and Michael Anderson on bass. That fall the new lineup recorded All This, and Money, Too for Ridge Runner, adding drums, electric guitar and steel to the acoustic band, and in the winter of 1980–81 American and Clean for Flying Fish, with Sam Bush as a guest. The same players backed one another on solo records produced by Slim Richey for Ridge Runner: Munde’s The Banjo Kid Picks Again and two volumes of Festival Favorites, and Carr’s own Otter Nonsense, recorded in January and February 1980, on which he thanked Clarence White, Albert Lee, James Burton, Marty Stuart and Sam Bush among the players he had learned from. With Bill Smith on bass the band recorded America’s Bluegrass Band (Flying Fish, 1982), on which Carr played guitar and mandolin and sang with White and Smith, and live recordings from his years in the band appeared on Live on the Road (1984).

In 1984 he left Country Gazette to teach at South Plains College, giving student ensembles and individual lessons on guitar and mandolin, and in his last years he was in charge of its bluegrass and Western swing departments and directed the Camp Bluegrass held there each year. In 1987 he formed a Western swing band in the style of Bob Wills, Joe Carr and the Texas Lone Star Band, which recorded Let’s Go Dancing Down in Texas (1992) and Dance Country (1995). He kept playing with his old bandmates, on guitar on Munde’s Festival Favorites Revisited (Rounder, 1993), with Roland White, Robert Bowlin, Michael Anderson and guests Marty Stuart and Jerry Douglas, and on fiddle and mandolin on Keep On Pushing (Flying Fish, 1991), credited to Alan Munde and Country Gazette.

Carr and Munde, by then his colleague at South Plains, worked as the duo Joe Carr & Alan Munde. They recorded Windy Days and Dusty Skies (Flying Fish, 1995) and Welcome to West Texas (1998), wrote Prairie Nights to Neon Lights: The Story of Country Music in West Texas (1996), and wrote and performed a two-man musical comedy, Two Swell Guys from Texas. Carr was the author of more than thirty instructional books and videos for Mel Bay, covering guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle and ukulele, and wrote regular columns for Flatpicking Guitar and Mandolin Magazine. In 2008 he and Munde received the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award. He died after a stroke in Levelland on 14 December 2014, at the age of 63.