Terry Manning

Primarily recognized for his decades-long work behind the console and in the producer’s chair, Terry Manning began engineering and producing sessions in the late ’60s and went on to collaborate with Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Molly Hatchet, George Thorogood, Widespread Panic, and Lenny Kravitz. His own recording career, however, is defined by a solitary, eccentric solo album that appeared in 1970 on Enterprise, the Stax subsidiary. The project began when Manning, while engineering a Box Tops session, spontaneously cut an over-the-top psychedelic version of the group’s “Choo Choo Train” purely as a joke. Stax vice president Al Bell heard the track, enjoyed it, and invited Manning to create an entire album in the same spirit. The resulting Home Sweet Home offered similarly exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek pastiches of soul, rockabilly, and country, together with lengthy Beatles covers. The record attracted scant attention on first release, yet eventually drew serious collectors; Sunbeam reissued it on CD in the U.K. in 2006, adding historical liner notes and bonus tracks. In 2013 Manning released his long-awaited follow-up, West Texas Skyline: a Tribute to Bobby Fuller.