Robert Plant honored

Robert Plant is getting a new plaque in a record shop, not a hall of fame. Record Store Day named him its 2026 Record Store Legend and tied the honor to this year’s vinyl event on Saturday, April 18, 2026. (recordstoreday.co.uk) (recordstoreday.com) The award is not just a United States thing or a United Kingdom thing. Record Store Day says the honor is jointly given by its United States and United Kingdom branches, with Elton John chosen first in 2017 and Johnny Marr following in 2025. (recordstoreday.co.uk) (recordstoreday.com) Plant fits the award because this one is about shops as much as songs. Record Store Day’s announcement says the recognition covers his global impact on music and his long-running support for record stores, new artists, and the store community around them. (recordstoreday.co.uk) (officialcharts.com) The ceremony happened in a place with its own piece of music history. Record Store Day posted video of Plant visiting Spillers Records in Cardiff, the shop widely known as the world’s oldest record store, to oversee installation of the Record Store Legend plaque. (recordstoreday.com) (yahoo.com) The timing is not random. Record Store Day 2026 is the 19th annual edition of the event, and organizers say thousands of independent stores worldwide take part with in-store events and limited releases built to get people physically back into shops. (gratefulweb.com) (recordstoreday.com) Plant is also using the day the way record stores want artists to use it: with a release you have to go out and find. His new 12-inch vinyl extended play record, *Saving Grace: All That Glitters… with Suzi Dian*, is listed as a Record Store Day exclusive on Nonesuch and on the official Record Store Day release page. (nonesuch.com) (recordstoreday.com) That extended play record is small by design. The official listing says it has four new studio recordings and a run of 3,500 copies, which is exactly the kind of scarcity Record Store Day uses to turn a shopping trip into a line-around-the-block event. (recordstoreday.com) (ledzepnews.com) The songs also show where Plant has been spending his post-Led Zeppelin years. The track list includes “Blackest Crow,” arranged from a traditional song, plus covers of Bert Jansch’s “Poison,” Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl,” and “She Cried” by Ted Daryll and Greg Richards. (recordstoreday.com) (nonesuch.com) Saving Grace is not a nostalgia side project built for one shopping holiday. Nonesuch says the new extended play record follows Plant’s recent *Saving Grace* album, and both releases feature singer Suzi Dian and the same band of musicians from the English countryside where Plant lives. (nonesuch.com) (recordstoreday.co.uk) So the story is not that Robert Plant got another lifetime-achievement mention. It is that a 77-year-old singer best known for arena rock is being honored by a retail event built around independent shops, and he is marking it with a limited vinyl release aimed at people who still flip through bins on April 18 instead of pressing play at home. (yahoo.com) (recordstoreday.com)