Isaac Alexander

“The wheels never stop turning.” That’s the answer when I ask the ludicrous question of one of the most prolific Southern soul songwriters alive: “Are you always writing or just when you’re working on a new project?” 

If you don’t know who Dan Penn is, I could tell you he was a white kid from Vernon, Alabama, who was taken with the forbidden sounds of 1950s southern radio stations blasting out the music of Black America into communities like his where Black voices largely went unheard. This is where Penn discovered Ray Charles, James Brown and ultimately, Elvis Presley, who he says “…was the guy who showed us white Southern kids the way.” I could also tell you he was bitten by the songwriting bug as a teenager, where he scored an early hit with Arkansas native Conway Twitty, who recorded Dan’s first cut, the Jimmy Reed sound-alike, “Is a Bluebird Blue,” or that he went on to write “Cry Like a Baby” and produce the mega-hit “The Letter” for the Box Tops with a young Alex Chilton under his direction.

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But you likely know him because he, along with songwriting co-conspirators like Spooner Oldham, became the bright lights of the Muscle Shoals and Memphis music machines of the 1960s and the writer behind such epic soul classics as “Do Right Woman,” “I’m Your Puppet,” “Dark End of the Street,” “Out of Left Field,” “It Tears Me Up” and “You Left the Water Running.” The list goes on for decades, including the title track to Solomon Burke’s Grammy Award-winning comeback album, “Don’t Give Up on Me,” which was a recurring song featured in the early-2000s teen drama “The O.C.”

Encyclopedia of Alabama
Dan Penn, David Briggs and Spooner Oldham

I talked to Penn recently not as a journalist, but as a fan, a musician, a songwriter and as someone whose personal musical journey led me to him and his peers by finding a core group of artists, musicians and songwriters that had to be partially excavated and sifted apart and away from the noise of disposable 1980s popular music. In this way, we share common ground. It’s the same way he and his generation of artists found their connection at a time the airwaves were bombarding them with Perry Como, Patti Page, and the edgy sounds of Pat Boone. 

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When we spoke, there were a dozen areas I would have liked to discuss – his experience working on Ry Cooder’s “Boomer’s Story” album; his time working with Chips Moman and the legendary “Elvis in Memphis” sessions; the drug-fueled years of epic recording sessions and volumes of songs written during that period; or the legendary and apocryphal stories of the shelved and never-heard album “Emmet the Singing Ranger Live in the Woods,” produced by our mutual friend Jim Dickinson, that includes two Harley Davidsons being revved in the studio, to the point of carbon monoxide poisoning risk for everyone in attendance. But, because his career spans the majority of his 80 years on the planet and he’s talked about these things in many interviews or, as is sometimes the case doesn’t want to talk about them at all, I was never going to scratch the surface of those years and all my curiosities in a single call, nor would I ask him to indulge me in the time it would take. So we talked about a micro-subject: playing the slow pocket. In all of the performances I’ve heard on record and witnessed in-person of Penn playing his own compositions, one consistent thing I’ve noticed is that his version of his songs are always subtly (in many cases, a lot) slower than the recorded versions. I suspected that he probably judged most of the recorded versions of his songs to be this way too, so I asked. He told me I had a good ear. I told him the story about how Mahalia Jackson referred to her style of singing in comparison to the vocal aerobics of other gospel vocalists who sang for show as “singing flat-footed.” He agreed that Mahalia, Ray Charles, and, oddly, Kate Smith were vocalists he admired whose styles were to sing out and sometimes hold their footing, without trying to fill the awkward, vulnerable spaces a singer encounters. Those spaces are often tempting to load up with vocal runs and histrionics, in lieu of welcoming the silence and long spaces with open singing and an exposed soul. 

I once saw Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham performing on a stage at one of those god-awful Nashville songwriter showcases. For the uninitiated, this is something that happens in Nashville where songwriters who might have once had aspirations to be the next Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Neil Young (or Dan Penn) sit on stools and wax poetic about a song they wrote and then perform it. During their turn on the mic, they will perform an audio short story about being stuck in traffic and seeing a woman crying in her car, then imagine a Civil War widow waiting for the husband who never returns, blah, blah, blah … often for a painful length of time, only to conclude the story with their hit song, “Beer for My Horses,” “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” or some other Nashville drivel. 

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It was entertaining to watch Dan, wearing his now trademark overalls and sport coat, while nursing a toothpick from time to time; and Spooner, wearing the same casual dress shirt and slacks that has been his uniform since the beginning, sit idly and non-reactive to the schlock preceding them on the stage. Then, with his turn at the mic, Dan leaned in and said simply, “This is one Marvin Gaye had a cut on …” And they launched into the most soulful, minimal, and slowly executed version of “I’m Your Puppet” you will ever hear. As with many (most?) of his songs, his can be better than the version you might know. In my opinion, it’s because he does something that’s extremely difficult to do. He performs them at the absolute slowest possible tempo, in order to extract every ounce of soul and juice the melody and words have to offer, without making it feel too slow. It is easy to play songs fast. It’s painfully difficult to find that sweet spot and a pocket where it’s just right, but doesn’t feel like it’s dragging. I suggested to Dan that he was the Master of Slow Pocket. He laughed and said, “I never thought about it like that, but I think that’s it.”

Before we wrapped up our chat I asked Dan a pretty standard question. Out of all of the great songs he’s been part of, did he have a favorite? I suspected he would say “Dark End of the Street” which, by most accounts, is considered to be one of the greatest soul songs of all time. In music writer circles, it’s hailed as the soul equivalent of country music’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (Let’s put aside the controversial take that this is not even the best song on that George Jones album, let alone the ultimate country music song). He dismissed the idea, most especially “Dark End of the Street.” 

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“I don’t have any kids of my own. These are my kids and I have no favorites.”

Dan Penn performs at 7 p.m. sharp at the White Water Tavern on Sunday, Oct. 30. Full disclosure: I have the distinct honor of opening the show. 

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