It’s hard to believe it’s already that time of year, but Record Store Day 2026 (RSD) is right around the corner (Saturday, April 18). Here’s the second of several titles we’re highly recommending you seek out at your local vinyl store (you can read about the first one here).
Terry Callier at the Earl of Old Town (Time Traveler Recordings)
We don’t know that we ever heard Chicago guitarist and singer Terry Callier before this recently unearthed recording came our way, even with Callier having spent a portion of his musical career on the Cadet Records subsidiary of the same Chess Records label on which such blues greats as Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, and others all recorded, and with Callier also having been childhood friends with the likes of soul greats Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler (The Impressions) and jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis.
In all fairness to us, most descriptions of Callier refer to him as a jazz, soul and/or folk artist so he wouldn’t necessarily have been someone who would have caught our largely blues-focused attention, although he did release more than a dozen albums in the decades before his death in 2012.
While tracks like “Blues”/”You Goin’ Miss Your Candyman” and “Hangman”/”Gallow’s Pole” off those albums certainly would have been enough to catch our ear had we ever heard them from Callier, we have to say that none of the other Callier albums to which we’ve listened after being amazed by this one come anywhere close to what you hear on this raw, previously unreleased live solo double LP recorded at Chicago’s Earl of Old Town folk club in 1967, just one year before the release of his debut album The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier (which was actually recorded three years prior to this performance but not released until 1968).
The audience here is frequently noisier than one likes to hear either on recording or in-person, especially when someone as talented as Callier (just 22 years old at the time) is performing, although Callier does manage to quiet or at least drown out that noise much of the time with his powerful vocals and guitar playing. As noted, Callier wasn’t a dedicated bluesman, but the two-disc album contains a number of terrific takes from Callier on songs with which blues fans will be familiar, including Willie Dixon’s “The Seventh Son”, the traditional “Deep Elem Blues” and “Gallows Pole” (Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, Odetta, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Led Zeppelin), and Nat Adderley/Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Work Song” (Nina Simone, Butterfield Blues Band, Robben Ford, Ana Popovic), as well as a few other blues or blues-sounding tracks such as “St. Mark’s Blues” (credited here to Billy Hancock but which also appeared on Callier’s 1972 Cadet Records debut Occasional Rain as an original titled “Blues for Marcus” several years before Hancock seems to have started his recording career) and Jimmy Drew’s “Willie Jean” (David Crosby/The Byrds, Gram Parsons), the latter of which, Callier explains, “may sound like a blues, but…it’s just written in the key of D minor” (which is bluesy enough for us to listen to!)
Callier’s impressive vocals range from smooth and melancholy on tracks like “Last Thing on My Mind” to booming and commanding, often during the same song, frequently reminding us of such favorites as Canadian bluesman Matt Andersen and the late, great Paul Pena. And, while Callier’s guitar playing tends to be modest much of the time, it’s difficult not to appreciate his Zeppelin-esque transitions on “Gallows Pole” (played here three years before the band would have recorded their version of the song), the energetic strumming that accompanies “Deep Elem Blues” and Callier’s aggressive playing on “The Seventh Son”.
Callier fans likely will appreciate the opportunity to hear this live version of the “900 Miles” that was included on his New Folk Sound debut, and we can’t imagine anyone not digging Callier’s soulful, closing take on the pop-rock hit “Hang on Sloopy”, included here with its original title of “My Girl Sloopy”.
This album doesn’t appear to be part of the RSD offerings in the U.S. as it is in the UK and Europe (as also seems to be the case with the 25th anniversary release of Buddy Guy’s Sweet Tea), but readers in the U.S. fortunately won’t have to wait too much longer to be able to snag a copy, with both vinyl and CD editions of the album set to hit bins in U.S. stores on April 24th.