courtesy of Carson J. Robison Collection, Pittsburg State University

You would hear fiddle music and singing wafting across the open prairie most evenings around Albert and Maggie Robison’s place. At the close of the nineteenth century, Bert and his three brothers were widely known throughout the area for their winning ways at fiddle contests, and were in high demand for square dances and frolics throughout the region. Maggie had a “beautiful singing voice,” her son Carson later recalled, and her fine playing on the melodeon and piano was in demand at church, play parties, and social events around Chetopa, a small ranching village near the southeastern border of Kansas.

Carson Robison was born in Oswego, Kansas, on Aug. 4, 1890. A couple of years later, the family had moved south to better range in Chetopa, where Bert continued his work as a stock trader. Chetopa, by then, was a bustling little city on the banks of the Neosho River, boasting factories, newspapers, a literary society, a library, and a new opera house that had opened only seven years before. Just two miles north of the Indian Territory line (Oklahoma wouldn’t become a state until 1907), it was a major shipping point for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway – popularly called the Katy, and a focal point of turn-of-the-century frontier culture. Though the big cattle drives had long since moved further west, the region was still a land of fruitful plains where stock fattened and prospered on the rich bluestem grasses. The Robison family kept busy gathering stock for the Eastern markets. Hard work and pluck were the mark of Chetopans, and they took their entertainment in the same spirit. Show people from the East rode in on the Katy bringing the latest tunes for performances at the Bates Opera House. The town was widely known for its spectacular Fourth of July celebrations, and the musical Robison clan fit easily into the social mix.

Growing up with all that music, young Carson naturally picked it up. He became a crack guitarist, and learned harmonica, banjo, and mandolin. By the time he was fourteen, when he wasn’t helping his dad move cattle and work horses, he was a regular with the Robison elders at area square dances and play parties, and on the road with other players. He learned the finer points of composition and put his first song to paper, “Anthem,” at the age of fifteen. By way of his father and uncles, he learned to call the intricate patterns for square dances.

It was a musical trick he had accidentally discovered that would boost him into the limelight and open doors to the big time. He developed an ability to whistle two tones simultaneously – a feat that annoyed his father, who used to send him out of the house with his perpetual practicing. But a storekeeper in Chetopa liked it, and would ask Carson to whistle a tune for him every time he came around. “That whistle is going to take you to the big time,” he would say to the youngster. Carson later remembered stopping in at the store often to hear the encouraging words of praise.