Four brothers of the Hitt family, one of whom was William Newton Hitt, Carl's great, great grandfather, moved from Alabama and settled a couple of miles north of Piggott, Arkansas in what is now known as Hitt Community just after the Civil War. The community was named after William Newton Hitt because he donated the land where Hitt School was originally built.

In the late 1880s, William Newton Hitt's son, William Henry Hitt married Fannie Betty Thomas, and they bought a large farm four miles east of Piggott near Brown's Ferry on the Saint Francis River where they raised their seven children, Curlly, Louie, Avis, Corbett, Colly, Dallas, Charles Alva "Pug." In 1951 the extended family sold the farm after learning that a new levee was going to cut across the property.

Carl's grandparents, Cully and Gracie Hitt, moved into Piggott, and his parents, Dink and Bea, bought a 40-acre hill farm back in the Hitt Community where they built a new house and lived there for the next 40 years before finally moving into Piggott.

In 1944, Dink married Bea Rhodes from the famous musical Rhodes family of Howell County, Missouri. She and her brothers, Slim, Speck and Dusty were the Mother's Best Log Cabin Mountaineers with a daily radio show first at KWOC in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, then at KLCN in Blytheville, Arkansas, and finally at KARK in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bea left the band when she married Dink, but her brothers continued their careers with a weekly television show on WMCT in Memphis that began in 1947 and lasted into the late 1960s.

In the early 1950s, Dink served two terms as Clay County Tax Assessor. After that, he owned and operated W. E. Hitt Water Well Company before finally retiring in 1969.

Dink died in 1999, and Bea died in 2014. They are survived by their two children, Barbara and Carl (Buster) and four granddaughters.