Terry Manning

Terry Manning is mostly known as an engineer and producer whose career started in the late '60s and spanned several decades, including work with Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Molly Hatchet, George Thorogood, Widespread Panic, and Lenny Kravitz. As a recording artist, however, he's known for one oddball solo album, released in 1970 on Stax's Enterprise subsidiary. The project originated in the late '60s when Manning, while engineering a Box Tops session, recorded as a joke an excessively psychedelic version of a track the group was working on, "Choo Choo Train." To his surprise, Stax vice president Al Bell liked the recording and asked Manning to produce a whole album in the same vein. The result was Home Sweet Home, which featured similarly overdone, albeit in a joking manner, pastiches of soul, rockabilly, and country, as well as a couple of drawn-out Beatles covers. Though it drew little notice upon its original release, the record eventually attracted attention from serious collectors, and was reissued on CD in the U.K. by Sunbeam in 2006 with historical liner notes and bonus tracks. In 2013, Manning finally released a follow-up album with West Texas Skyline: a Tribute to Bobby Fuller.