Terry Manning – Home Sweet Home

When Terry Manning sings about his “dear old mother” in “Choo Choo Train”, he doesn’t give a damn about her. Written by Donnie Fritts and Eddie Hinton, “Choo Choo Train” is only marginally straighter in the Box Tops’ version, which Manning engineered. Home Sweet Home is a record of magnificently conceived and beautifully recorded parodies, and it’s not without overtones of something approaching real feeling. Originally released in 1970 on the Stax imprint Enterprise, Home Sweet Home gives George Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle” and Jack Clement’s “Guess Things Happen That Way” the Memphis anglophile treatment, with Richard Rosebrough’s drums locked into a stiff post-soul-music groove. It illustrates how Manning, Chris Bell (who plays guitar on four tracks) and other Ardent Studios denizens created Memphis power-pop by letting local traditions collide with cosmopolitan abstraction. These heartfelt jokes point the way toward Big Star’s #1 Record and Radio City.