Dan Penn

McGonigel’s Mucky Duck presents Dan Penn. TWO SHOWS!

Dan Penn helped shape the development of southern soul music with his legendary songwriting, musicianship and production.

A native of Vernon, Alabama, Penn moved to the Florence/Muscle Shoals area while still a teenager and assumed the role of lead vocalist in a local group calling itself the Mark V Combo.

When asked what kind of music they played, Penn replies, “R&B, man. There was no such thing as rock. That was somethin’ you picked up and throwed.” He laughs. “Or threw.”

It was around this time that he penned his first chart record, Conway Twitty’s “Is a Bluebird Blue”. During the early ’60s, Penn began working with Rick Hall at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, first as a songwriter, and then as an artist under the names Lonnie Ray, Danny Lee, and finally Dan Penn.

According to Penn, the reason people hear touches of country in his brand of R&B is “because I’m an old hillbilly myself. Took me about 30 years to find out I was still a hillbilly. But compared to R&B, country is much easier. You ain’t got to struggle. Anybody can sing, ‘Because you’re mine, I walk the line.’

Go try to write ‘Out of Left Field’; go find all those chords and what all that means. So a hillbilly I am, but in the ’60s I really loved R&B music, and there was a lot of it to love. I loved Jimmy Reed, Bobby Bland, Ray Charles, Little Milton, James Brown… I always respected the black singers because they were always there — we were trying to get there. Knowing that the black singers wanted my songs inspired me.”

Acclaimed singer/songwriter/producer Dan Penn just released Junkyard Junky on his own Dandy Records label July 29. Junkyard Junky continues an intimate “behind-the-scenes” portrait of this master songwriter that began in 2001 with Blue Nite Lounge, the first offering in Penn’s “demo series”.

The album features 14 songs written or co-written by Penn, many of which have never been recorded, and will be exclusively available on his Web site at DanPenn.com.

As the co-writer of such global classics as “Do Right Woman,” “I’m Your Puppet,” “Cry Like a Baby,” “A Woman Left Lonely,” “Dark End of the Street,” and “Sweet Inspiration”, Penn is often asked about his “other” demos—those that he recorded back in the heyday of soul, which have long been sought after by fans and collectors around the World.

Penn says, “People ask me all the time about those old Muscle Shoals demos. I called for a copy of all of them from EMI a few years back. They sent them, I heard them, and I just didn’t think they were good enough to release. They were good for one thing—and that was, to impress the artist they were pitched to. This they did very well. I guess they would be interesting to somebody, I don’t know, but I do know that these new demos are what I’m writing now, and I live on that, not on what I did 40 years ago.”