Dan Penn gave the world some of the greatest soul songs ever recorded. Now 84, he is sitting on the porch of his Nashville home, talking about cheating songs, Otis Redding, and why demos sound better than the finished record.
By Jason Barnard
The voice on the telephone is unhurried, a little gravelled, and unmistakably Southern. Dan Penn is on his porch in Nashville with his wife Linda beside him. He is not a man who rushes, so much so it takes me a few minutes to align with his pace. Yet the songs he co-wrote in the 1960s, ‘The Dark End of the Street’, ‘Do Right Woman Do Right Man’, ‘I’m Your Puppet’, ‘You Left the Water Running’, feel like they’ve always been around. “They were just sitting there waiting on me, I reckon,” he says, which is how he describes the songs on his new album, Smoke Filled Room. He means it literally: some of those tracks had been sitting around for twenty years or more, half-finished, waiting.
Penn is 84 and still writes. Not like he did in the 1960s, when he wrote “day and night,” but he still makes the sessions, still sits down with someone, still listens for the thing that might arrive. “It takes a lot of energy to write,” he says. “I have a few writing sessions a year and I love to write. I haven’t lost that.”
The title track of Smoke Filled Room is one he wrote two decades ago and recorded three or four times before finally getting it right. What changed? He let someone else handle the mix. “Sometimes you have to let somebody else help you,” Penn says.
He has strong opinions about demos versus master recordings, opinions that have only hardened over sixty years. “Demos always sound better to me than some masters,” he says. “We tend to go overboard sometimes on the real records. We put too much on, or do something, and they kind of come out cold. And the demos are much warmer, more closer to the bone.” He pauses. “When you sang the song you just wrote, you’re so proud of it and you have great feelings for it. Five years later, you might not feel the same way about that same song. But right when you get through with one and you demo it, you’re pretty good at that point. That’s as good as you’re gonna get.”
Chips Moman, his great collaborator, felt the same way. “Chips and me, one time, somebody said these records are great, but Dan’s demos are better. So I go along with that.”
Penn’s Early Years
Penn was raised on a farm in Alabama. He started writing songs as a teenager, and recorded four or five tracks at a small studio in Alabama, and one of them, ‘Is a Bluebird Blue’, was picked up by a music publisher who passed it to Conway Twitty. Twitty recorded it, it charted, and a junior in high school suddenly had a record on the radio.
“I never had a chart record of nothing before,” Penn says. “So I seen you could make a living at it. You didn’t get rich, but I seen you could make a few bucks at it.” He laughs quietly. “That little song opened every door for me.”
The next door it opened was Tom Stafford’s studio in the Muscle Shoals area, above a drug store. It was there, walking in one afternoon, that he first encountered the world he would inhabit for the rest of his life. “There was three or four grown men still in the bed at twelve o’clock noon,” Penn recalls. “And I thought, oh man, this is a life for me, because I was always a sleepy-headed boy.” He met Spooner Oldham there, “Everybody that was there did great,” he says simply.
From Muscle Shoals he went to Memphis, to Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio, where he produced The Box Tops. He was twenty-five. The group were even younger, entirely inexperienced, and the singer they arrived with was, in Penn’s patient phrasing, “a bit of a smart bud.” Penn sent them away with a Wayne Carson demo tape. “I said, learn this song right here. Come on back, we’ll record.” Two weeks later they came back on a Saturday and there was nobody at the studio but Penn and the band, and they tracked ‘The Letter.’ Later he added the strings and horns. “Worked out pretty good,” he says.
He produced three albums and four singles for The Box Tops, doing much of the engineering. “That’s what we used to do,” he says. “I still engineer and produce at the same time if I can.”
‘The Dark End of the Street’ came out of a poker game
Penn and Chips Moman were in Nashville for the annual disc jockey convention, playing cards with a few others. At some point, everyone got tired. Penn and Moman stepped into a side room. There was a guitar. They started singing.
“I don’t know where it comes from, to tell you the truth,” Penn says. “The idea just floated by and we grabbed it.” They wrote it that night and brought it back to Memphis.
The subject matter, two people in an illicit love affair, meeting in the shadows, was not unusual for the time and place. “Every Southern writer, most of them, was wanting to write cheating songs,” Penn explains. “They were just part of the air at that time.” Hank Williams had made it legitimate. Rick Hall had cut ‘Steal Away’ by Jimmy Hughes, which Penn considered “a fantastic record, the greatest cheating song” before ‘The Dark End of the Street’. They were all after the same thing, and sometimes someone got there first, and sometimes it was you.
When it came time to record ‘The Dark End of the Street’ with James Carr, Penn sang the pilot vocal himself, Carr not yet ready to commit to the song. They cut the track at Willie Mitchell’s place, then moved to American Studio when a new console was installed. Carr came in later and laid his vocal over the top. Penn sang harmony. And then, at the very end, he did something unrepeatable.
“You know that lady at the end?” Penn says. “That black lady at the end going up high?” He waits. “That was me.”
He laughs at the memory. “Back then, I could do about anything I wanted to with my voice. Chips said, do you got another track? I said turn me on. And I just kind of went into this kind of falsetto high thing. Unreal, really. I was a black lady there for a few minutes.” Six decades later, he is still pleased with himself about it.
You Left the Water Running
Penn was in the studio the night Otis Redding recorded ‘You Left the Water Running’. He was there because he was always there. Anywhere anything was being cut around Muscle Shoals, Penn found a reason to be in the room.
That night, a session had just wrapped in the studio. ‘Sweet Soul Music’ had been cut. Rick Hall played the tape back, maybe a hundred times, everyone dancing around the control room, and then gradually people drifted out until it was just Hall, Redding, and Penn.
Hall turned to Redding. “He said, Big O, that’s what he called him, he said, Big O, I want you to do me a favour. He said what’s up, Rick? He said, I want you to sing a demo of a song me and Dan wrote.”
Penn got his guitar and played ‘You Left the Water Running’. Redding listened once, then reached over. “He said, give me the guitar. And he proceeded to sing it. He didn’t know the chords, he was just hitting on the strings. And he sang it perfectly, first time through with the lyrics, and he just took off.” They put a microphone on him and he did it again. Penn sang a little harmony. That was the recording.
Not long after, Redding’s plane went down in a Wisconsin lake. “If Otis had lived,” Penn says, “the music business would have been different.”
‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ was written after dinner
Penn and his wife had gone over to Chips Moman’s house in Memphis to eat. After the meal, Penn and Moman stepped into another room. There was a guitar, a big Gibson Super 400, and Moman, a good guitar player, started playing. Penn started singing.
When Jerry Wexler brought Aretha Franklin to Muscle Shoals to record, the plan was to cut several tracks. The session went sideways when something caused Franklin to walk out. Penn is not specific about what. She and Wexler went back to New York, but Wexler wanted that band, so the musicians followed. Penn went too.
“I’m going up there,” he told himself, and he went.
In Atlantic’s control room, Wexler played Penn the finished record. Franklin had overdubbed her lead vocal. Her sisters sang with her. “It was a wonderful thing,” Penn says humbly. “They made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear for sure. Just floored me. One of the highlights of my life.”
Penn had sung the original pilot vocal on the track himself, because Franklin had been unwilling to commit to the song at the session. That was standard practice for him: sing it himself first, give the artist something to respond to.
Penn’s approach to writing has never changed. He has always refused to separate lyric from melody, always written everything together, the words and the tune arriving in the same movement.
“Me and Spooner wrote a lot of songs,” he says of his decades-long partnership with keyboardist Spooner Oldham, “and I’ve written a lot of songs with a lot of people. But we never did look at a song like that, this is the lyric, these are the melodies. We just wrote them. Everything went as it went. Who’s to say who did what? It’s just all included.”
In a writing session, he says, anything can happen. “Sometimes you hit on something pretty important, or at least it feels like. And sometimes you don’t get nothing. Sometimes you just say, let’s go boating.” He pauses. “One chord, just one right chord, can set you off. Or one line. You might meet somebody on the street and look in their eyes and get a line. It’s a funny deal to tell you about, songwriting. You never know what’s happening.”
There is something else he describes, a kind of trance. “When you’re in it real deep, you’re kind of glazed over. Kind of in limbo.” You get the song, you demo it, and if you really like it, you’ve done great.
On Nashville
He has lived in Nashville since the 1970s, but he doesn’t feel it in his bones the way he feels Memphis, or Muscle Shoals. Nashville’s country world is its own closed universe, with rules he never adopted. “Those guys up there can eat your lunch on that country music,” he says, without rancour. “I don’t even try. I just still do the same outlook I always had, which is straight ahead. Don’t go left, don’t go right. Just straight ahead.” He has his own studio at his house and hardly goes downtown.
The new album includes ‘Hellbound Snowball’, written years ago with Bobby Emmons, the pianist who played with Penn ad Elvis Presley. Penn describes it as strange, in the best sense. “It don’t ever say what it’s all about. And sometimes it’s best that way. It’s the sound sometimes, it’s not the meaning.” He reaches for a comparison, joking, “Procol Harum didn’t have no meaning either, did it?”
He found the song in the back of his archives and played it to Linda. She liked it. That settled it.
‘One Blue Light’ is the most personal track on the album, the one that took longest to arrive. Penn got the idea while driving around Alabama at Christmas, riding the back roads. Every Christmas after that he would come home and tell himself he was going to write it. Then, finally, he just sat down by himself, at four in the morning with nobody around, and played the keyboards himself, though he does not really play keyboards, and got it done.
“It’s a different sounding cut,” he says. “Real. I can say that because I had to do it by myself.”
Spooner Oldham is coming over on Sunday to rehearse. They have a show in New Orleans coming up. They still play and still have what Penn calls their chemistry. It’s something he cannot fully explain and does not try to, except to say that he does not have it with anyone else, and he doubts Oldham does either. They do not write together much now, but they talk about it.
“We might jump in there someday,” Penn says, “and write another ‘Sweet Inspiration’ or something.”
Dan continues to site outside on the porch. Linda is sitting with him.
Further information
The audio version of this interview is on The Strange Brew
This interview was undertaken on April 22 2026.
