A Skinny White Boy Who Loved Black Music
“Take me to heart and I'll always love you
And nobody can make me do wrong
Take me for granted, leaving love unsure
Makes willpower weak and temptation strong”
-Dan Penn’s “Do Right Woman”
In the northwest corner of Alabama, along the Tennessee River, sits the quad cities of Florence (on the north side), Tuscumbia, Sheffield and Muscle Shoals (the smallest of the four). Collectively this area is known as Muscle Shoals. The early settlers lived on the abundant fresh water mussels that grew on the banks and eddies of the Tennessee River. The area got its name from the shoal (albeit with the long standing miss-spelling).
The 1950’s in the US was an exciting time for the music business, in particular the record business. Entrepreneurs were starting recording studios and record publishing businesses all over America. For whatever twist of fate, Tennessee was at the epicenter of this phenomenon. Nashville was first dubbed “Music City USA” in 1950. Sam Phillips opened Sun studios in Memphis in 1952. Stax and Hi Records both started in 1957, also in Memphis. Anyone with the music bug thought they could make a hit.
In 1956, James Joiner, who owned a bus company in Florence, decided to create Alabama’s first record company, Tune Records. They recorded in the back of the Florence Bus station. In 1957, Joiner, after seeing a falling star, wrote a song called “A Fallen Star”, and recorded it, sung by a local high school boy. The song became a minor regional hit. Word quickly spread through the mid-South’s music circles that “a guy was making hit records down in Muscle Shoals” so folks with the itch began to drift in from all over the south. One of those was a Nashville musician, with dreams of grandeur, named Rich Hall. Hall came to Joiner to pitch his song ideas and to help record. When Joiner decided to close his record business in 1959, Hall started his own studio Florence Alabama Music Enterprises or FAME studios. Through Hall’s will and determination, FAME would become the foundation for the Muscle Shoals Sound. Into that mix wandered a young musician named Dan Penn. Originally from Vernon, Alabama (population 2,000), listening to the radio gave him his first exposure to black music. He didn’t buy any records because there was no place to buy them.
Penn: “We didn’t know nothing [about music] until black people put us on the right road. I never would have learned nothing if I’d have stayed listening to white people all my life.”
Rich Hall: “Dan Penn came up from Vernon, and just absolutely intrigued all of us, because here was this kid, white, 16 years old, singing like Ray Charles, just in love with black music. He was the real thing. He knew more about black music than the rest of us put together.” Hall continued: “I was especially impressed with his depth of perception on songs and material.”
While in Vernon, Penn played in a square dance band with Billy Sherrill who left for Muscle Shoals to try his hand at record making and became an early partner in FAME. Sherrill called Penn and said “Come on up, let’s make some records...”
Penn began his career as a performer, leading several white R&B bands around the Muscle Shoals area. Achieving early success by selling a hit song to Conway Twitty ("Is a Bluebird Blue?"), the songwriter eventually moved to Memphis, joining producer Chips Moman at his American Studios. Together the two, along with Penn's writing partner, organist Spooner Oldham, wrote and/or produced several hits for the Box Tops, such as "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby," throughout the late '60s.
Penn eventually returned to Muscle Shoals during the period when Atlantic Records vice president Jerry Wexler was bringing acts like Aretha Franklin and Solomon Burke down from New York to record there. This led to Franklin cutting the Penn/Oldham composition "Do Right Woman," and for the next several years, Penn compositions such as "Dark End of the Street," "Woman Left Lonely" and "I'm Your Puppet" became soul classics and were recorded by such greats as James Carr, Janis Joplin and Dionne Warwick, respectively.
What was important to Penn was the story. He wanted to write music that would move people. “People ask me how I write my songs, and my answer is always, I write straight ahead. I’m one of those beeline persons, don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right”. He continued: “We always made stuff up. I don’t write no true stories. I don’t believe in ‘em. You can’t write songs that way.” Asked about the process of songwriting Penn said. “You put yourself out in the atmosphere and say ‘hmmmm….let’s dream awhile’”.
“The worst thing ever said in a studio is ‘What do you think?’ We ain’t thinking, we’re feeling… I try to think, ‘what would my heart feel?’ Everybody that’s ever cut a record or wrote a song has put their heart into it. In Alabama we don’t skip that part; we worked with our heads as well as our hearts.”
Essential Dan Penn Discography:
Aretha Franklin “Do right woman, Do right man”
Arthur Alexander “Cry like a baby”
James and Bobby Purify “I’m your Puppet”
James Carr or Aretha Franklin “Dark End of the Street”
Toussaint McCall “Let’s do it over”
Percy Sledge “Out of Left Field”
Joe Simon “Nine Pound Steel”
Box Tops “The Letter”
Irma Thomas “Zero Will Power”
Kind of like Dan Penn, this (formerly) skinny white boy grew up in small town Inny-Anna, as we used to say. Matt Powell fell in love with black music while in high school near the Crucible of the funk, Dayton OH (look it up). Now he lives in Maine, where he brings the funk to WMPG community radio, Sundays, noon to two. People pay him to talk about sneakers and he cooks a lot for fun.