Spooner Oldham is a Sheffield-born musician and songwriter who played on a who’s who of hit records at Shoals recording studios, including "When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge, "Mustang Sally" by Wilson Pickett and "I Never Loved a Man" by Aretha Franklin. He grew up in Center Star, where an accident involving a spoon blinded him in one eye and earned him his famous nickname. After taking up the piano while he was in junior high, he joined Hollis Dixon and the Keynotes, the “reigning” rock and R&B band in the Shoals area. Hanging out with fellow Keynotes alumni at SPAR Music above the City Drug Store in downtown Florence, he befriended other aspiring musicians like Dan Penn and Donnie Fritts, with whom he formed The Pallbearers.

In the early 1960s, when Rick Hall left SPAR and established FAME Studios across the Tennessee River in Muscle Shoals, Oldham and his young bandmates followed. After playing on Hall’s breakout hits as a producer, Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” and Jimmy Hughes’ “Steal Away,” Oldham became a fixture of FAME’s hit-making house band. He also recorded a pair of singles under his own name for Hall’s FAME Records, backed by his Pallbearers bandmates Roger Hawkins, Junior Lowe and Dan Penn. Perhaps most significantly, Oldham and Penn forged a songwriting partnership, scoring FAME-recorded hits with “Let’s Do It Over” and “I’m Your Puppet,” a Top Ten smash for James and Bobby Purify in 1966.