Dan Penn
DAN PENN
Dan Penn is a singer-songwriter, producer and musician who is perhaps best known for being the co-writer (with Lincoln “Chips” Moman) of such hits as Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and James Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street.” He is also famous for his partnership with Spooner Oldham, which produced James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” Percy Sledge’s “It Tears Me Up,” and other pop-soul classics. As a songwriter for FAME and its predecessor, SPAR Music, during the early 1960s, Penn played a significant role in the development of the Muscle Shoals music scene.
Dan Penn is a singer-songwriter, producer and musician who is perhaps best known for being the co-writer (with Lincoln “Chips” Moman) of such hits as Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and James Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street.” He is also famous for his partnership with Spooner Oldham, which produced James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” Percy Sledge’s “It Tears Me Up,” and other pop-soul classics. As a songwriter for FAME and its predecessor, SPAR Music, during the early 1960s, Penn played a significant role in the development of the Muscle Shoals music scene.
Born in Lamar County, Alabama, on November 16, 1941, Penn moved with his family to the town of Vernon when he was sixteen years old. There, he joined a band called Benny Cagle and the Rhythm Swingsters and wrote the song “Is a Bluebird Blue?” which became a hit for Conway Twitty in 1959. Later that year, Penn recorded his debut solo single, “Crazy Over You,” at SPAR Music and started performing with Shoals-based band The Mark V, who eventually changed their name to Dan Penn and the Pallbearers.
Penn married in 1962 and settled with his new wife in Muscle Shoals, where he took a job with Rick Hall as FAME’s first staff songwriter. Joe Simon’s Hall-produced single “Let’s Do It Over,” co-written with Pallbearers bandmate Oldham, gave Penn his first significant R&B hit in 1965. The following year, he left FAME and moved to Memphis, where he joined the staff of American Sound Studio, co-wrote “Do Right Woman” with Chips Moman, and produced the Box Tops’ number-one smash “The Letter.”
Penn is also renowned for his abilities as a vocalist, evident on his 1972 solo album Nobody’s Fool, and on The Fame Recordings, a 2012 compilation of singles, demos and other tracks dating from the 1960s.
Sources:
Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015).