Cast your eyes over the relatively slim discography and you might get the impression that Dan Penn (born Wallace Daniel Pennington on 16 November 1941) is a minor figure, but turn your attention to the contents and you’ll find the man who co-wrote songs like The Dark End Of The Street, Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (with Chips Moman) and Cry Like a Baby (with Spooner Oldham) and produced The Box Tops (from The Letter onwards) could sing a bit too. Actually, based on 1972’s Nobody's Fool (both the single and the album it came from) you could make a fair case for ranking him right up there with the best of the white soul singers of his generation, but it appears he’s more comfortable out of the spotlight, concentrating on writing and producing rather than recording and performing.
Penn grew up in a musical family in Vernon, Alabama. Dad played guitar, his mother played piano, and Dan had a guitar of his own by age nine. As a teenager he fell under the spell of the R&B and gospel music being spun on Nashville radio station WLAC, whose clear channel signal went out across most of the eastern and midwestern United States and into the Caribbean and southern Canada. He started playing in bands at fraternity and bar gigs across the South, including Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, the Muscle Shoals Fame Studio band with Penn on vocals. The rest of the outfit upped and moved holus bolus to Nashville in 1965, but Penn stayed behind in Alabama, forming a writing partnership with keyboard player Spooner Oldham with the pair writing Do Right Woman, Do Right Man on the spur of the moment when Aretha Franklin needed a new song. They’d already produced The Dark End of the Street for James Carr.
He’d had hits with songs recorded by Conway Twitty (1960’s Is a Bluebird Blue) but hit the big time with I'm Your Puppet by James & Bobby Purify in 1966, the year he moved from Muscle Shoals to Memphis to work with Chips Moman at American Studios.
At Muscle Shoals he might have done all-nighters working up and recording demos of new material, sessions fuelled by copious amounts of coffee, cigarettes and speed, but studio owner Rick Hall wouldn’t let him loose on the production side of things. Moman was another Fame alumnus, and the combination hit the big time with a string of smash singles for the Box Tops, including The Letter, Cry Like a Baby and Soul Deep, but by 1970, the two of them had fallen out and Penn decided to start his own operation, Beautiful Sound. He wasn’t cut out to be a businessman, and, in any case, the Memphis scene was in decline, Moman had left town, even Stax Records was almost down for the count.
Penn cut his first full length solo album, Nobody’s Fool, cut his losses and lit out for Nashville, where he mightn’t have had a lot of hits but got by comfortably on royalties from songs like A Woman Left Lonely, You Left the Water Running and Sweet Inspiration. A second solo album, 1993‘s Do Right Man, cut at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, reunited him with many of his former colleagues and occasional live gigs with Spooner Oldham resulted in Moments from This Theatre in 1999, which was, in turn, followed by a couple of sets of home recordings and The Fame Recordings, two dozen demos recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama between 1964 and 1966.