Covered: Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Volume 1: 1960-1968

If you don't know of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, you should. The allmusic.com website says, "Dan Penn is one of the major figures in soul music, composing many of the genre's standards," and he co-wrote most of those songs with Spooner Oldham. So this songwriting duo is the subject of the next albums in my "Covered" series highlighting great songwriters. I've found enough for two albums. Here's the first one.

Dan Penn has been the main figure in this duo, with Spooner Oldham playing a supportive role. Penn was born in 1941 in rural Alabama. He co-wrote his first hit in 1960, "Is a Blue Bird Blue" by Conway Twitty, while he was still in high school. However, after that, he struggled in the music business for a few years. Penn (who is still alive and performing as I write this in 2025) has an excellent, soulful voice. However, he wasn't able to find success as a performer.

But in the early 1960s, he began collaborating with Oldham, after the two of them were in an early band together. The earliest song here co-written by them is "Strangest Feeling," written in 1963. Oldham was also born in rural Alabama, two years after Penn. The two of them became very involved with writing, recording, and producing songs in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, especially at the FAME studio there. 

Things changed drastically for Penn and Oldham in 1966, when they co-wrote the song "I'm Your Puppet." The version by James and Bobby Purify was a big hit. When the royalty checks started coming in, Penn decided he could make a living just from songwriting. So he put his struggling career as a performer on the backburner. However, he usually made demos of the songs he wrote, and they often rivaled or even surpassed the hit versions. (A couple albums of these demos would be released decades later.)

Penn both wrote lyrics and music for his songs. However, aside from his first hit "Is a Blue Bird Blue," he almost never wrote a song by himself. He said he liked the instant feedback of songwriting collaboration. Most of his hits were co-written with Oldham (while Oldham only had one hit without him, "Lonely Women Make Good Lovers"). But he wrote with many others, and had some big hits with them. For instance, he only briefly wrote with Chips Moman in 1967, before they decided they clashed too much. But during that time, they co-wrote two of the greatest soul songs of all time, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and "The Dark End of the Street."

1966 to 1968 was a particularly productive time for Penn and Oldham. If you look at the below song list, they wrote one classic song after another. 

I found an interview with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello in which he expressed his admiration for Penn and Oldham. I wrote down a bit of what he said: "They wrote this extraordinary group of songs, and they made no acknowledgement of all the road signs that people erect to try to separate music. You can't really tell where the country and the soul and the rock and roll and the gospel stops and begins."

Costello further praised Penn's singing ability. "Dan is one of the greatest singers American pop music has ever created. Dan Penn is Elvis Presley if he had better taste. Dan Penn is every bit as good a singer as Elvis Presley and some, 'cos he has humility and restraint." I've included one song sung by Penn here, "Strangest Feeling," and another one on Volume 2. Hopefully that can give you a sense of his singing talent.

All the songs here are the original hit versions, in rough chronological order. Only a couple weren't at least minor hits at the time, most especially "Strangest Feeling," which was one of those demos I mentioned above that weren't released until decades later. 

Here's the Wikipedia page for Dan Penn:

Dan Penn - Wikipedia 

And here's the one for Spooner Oldham:

Spooner Oldham - Wikipedia 

This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Is a Blue Bird Blue (Conway Twitty)
02 Strangest Feeling (Dan Penn)
03 I'm Living Good (Ovations)
04 I'm Your Puppet (James & Bobby Purify)
05 It Tears Me Up (Percy Sledge)
06 You Left the Water Running (Otis Redding)
07 I Can't Stop [No, No, No] (Arthur Conley)
08 Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Aretha Franklin)
09 Out of Left Field (Percy Sledge)
10 The Dark End of the Street (James Carr)
11 Happy Times (Box Tops)
12 Nine Pound Steel (Joe Simon)
13 Cry like a Baby (Box Tops)
14 Sweet Inspiration (Sweet Inspirations)
15 I Worship the Ground You Walk On (Etta James)
16 Everything I Am (Plastic Penny)

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alternates:

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The cover image is taken from a photo of a band called the Pallbearers, from around 1964. Both Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham were members. So, using Photoshop, I cut on their parts of the photo and rearranged them so their heads were close together. Also, it was black and white photo, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

Oldham is on the left in the grey jacket. Penn is on the right with the black jacket.