The demos, the demos, the demos. Among aficionados of southern soul music, the demos Dan Penn recorded during the Sixties are regarded with the mythical awe of Bobby Thompson's legendary lost home run ball.

For those who view soul music history as the tip of the proverbial iceberg, there's a big block of cool beneath Aretha Franklin's "Do Right Woman," James Carr's "Dark End of the Street" and numerous other soul staples of the era, an age when the machinery behind the hits took a back seat to the voices that delivered it. In more than a few instances, particularly those songs cut at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the writer and/or producer and/or engineer on the recording was a teenage Dan Penn. Penn's input on the classic soul music of the period is the stuff of myth, as he would spend days locked in the studio tirelessly working on music. "That was my life," says Penn three decades after the fact. "I always said, just let me die at the board." Penn was a cornerstone at the studio, penning songs, recording the demos to provide a blueprint for a rotating crew of soul legends who would cut the tracks, and ultimately engineering and producing a number of the sessions. Along with pianist/songwriter Spooner Oldham and production and songwriting cohort Chips Moman, his impact on the history of the genre is inestimable.

Despite possessing a first rate, gritty soulful voice, Penn never chased a solo career. A 1973 album, Nobody's Fool was his sole public release until 1994 when he revisited some of his classic tunes for Do Right Man. The demos Penn recorded for Fame still remain outside of public reach, but last year he and some music-minded buddies (Bucky Lindsey on bass and Carson Whitsett on keys) took a fishing trip near St. Francisville, Louisiana. They brought along recording equipment and tapped into a similar stripped-down energy that yielded an unexpected album, Blue Nite Lounge, Penn's first domestic release in six years, and his first full album of new material since Nobody's Fool.

Tied to the album's decidedly spontaneous feel is its distinctive sense of place. "It didn't mean to go this far," Penn says of the album's release on his own label, Dandy Records. "I just said let's go to Louisiana and let's go fishing and take a few guitars and if we decide that we wanna write, then we will. We only went fishing once, so the music kinda took over. Louisiana is another place, not like anything in the United States. Their culture's is different, their food's different. All their stuff runs together, it's kinda like their gumbo. You can listen to the radio down there and you'll hear Otis Redding and the next cut might be George Jones . Up here [in Nashville], everybody's kind of boxed up, this bunch likes this and this bunch likes that. But in Louisiana everybody's just dancing and eating. Havin' a big time. That sets you to thinking about writing.

"I'll say that the region had all to do with how these songs came about. When you go down to the Texaco station and get yourself a big bowl of gumbo and a fried oyster box, it sets you in another place. And you see the people who are there and you look in these faces and you realize they're somewhere else than you are. And I tend to see stories in faces. When I'm having a good time I usually try to write no matter where I am. Anytime you get treated fine you feel good. And that kind of related and I started writing songs and the next thing you know we have a pretty good mess of songs."

With the gospel-tinged "Hold on to God," which was recorded in a 173-year-old church with a 140-year-old pipe organ to sounds of an April rainstorm that Penn captured on tape, the essence of Blue Nite Lounge is all about nuance and simplicity; songs and sounds that place Penn in the company of the likes of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, who utilized similar qualities in penning their canon.

For Penn, the regional inspiration echoed his childhood introduction to soul music, growing up in south Alabama in what would become the cradle for gospel-tinged southern soul. "I lived out in he country and I had my own little green plastic radio. Out in the country you go to bed around eight or nine. So when everybody else was going to sleep, I was dialing my little radio in, and I ran across WLAC out of Nashville and every night they would play blues, R&B, black spirituals, black preachers, all the above. And that's where I first heard R&B, and I guess I was about ten years old. And then of course the Elvis thing and Jerry Lee kinda kicked me out of that. And I got into my teens and went along that road for awhile, and then I heard Ray Charles. And when I heard Ray Charles, I thought man, there's the culmination of all of that. My father and my mother had a little front porch hillbilly band. They never tried to make a living from it, never played a gig. He would sing in church and Mama would play the piano. But when I got that radio, I was like, 'What is this. And after hearing Ray Charles and James Brown, I just said, "I am black." [Laughs]. And so away we went playing shows and having fun."

A short spell of touring and performing eventually led Penn further north to Muscle Shoals, where he fell in with Fame Records. He started work as a writer and began to learn his trade at the soundboard. Penn recorded some sides, but says that the R&B stations weren't receptive to a white man singing R&B.

Still, Penn's run at Fame has created a demand among R&B enthusiasts for the sides he did cut. "A few years ago, when I was in Europe, they were screaming, 'Give us the demos!'" he says. "I had EMI, who ended up with ownership of all of those, send me the DATS, but the quality sounded pretty bad. I just talked to Rodney Hall down at Fame and he's saying he's got some better sounding ones, so we're gonna take a look at 'em. I don't think they'll be along this year, maybe next year. I don't want it to interfere with my new album right now. I know people wanna hear 'em, but my bottom line is I don't wanna make a bad record, I don't care when it was cut. I've always had a bit of pride about my records."

And for those who wish Penn would take a trip back in time and try to bottle lightening once again, he would rather look forward. "Some people say, well you're not doing the Muscle Shoals thing," he says. "Well I'm passed that. Don't get me wrong, I still like to take a certain day with a certain musician and say, let's take it back to Muscle Shoals. The closest I got to that recently was with Al Kooper. We talked about that, and we said, 'Look let's put some barricades up here. Let's not cross it.' I'm just trying to write what I feel, that's all we ever did in the Sixties, but that was just a different time, where you had artists standing in the studio waiting for you to write a song. That's inspiration in itself."

If the Penn of today seems to be a far cry from the single-minded youngster who was rooted in the studio nearly forty years ago, it's just that the musical spirit has wisened. "I don't wanna die at the board or anywhere else now," he says. "I've mellowed out with time and a lot of things changed."

For the time being, Penn seems content to set Blue Nite Lounge out into the waters and see what direction the wind may take it, selling the album on his Web site, www.danpenn.com. He hasn't set plans to tour yet, but hasn't ruled out another series of tour dates with Oldham, as the duo did three years ago, with one night captured on the album, Moments From This Theater Live. And the speed of the DIY ethic agrees with him. "My wife gets up in the morning and checks the computer and we get some orders in and it just makes the day," he says. "That's always been the problem with me is getting my product in stores. I've never had success with big record labels, but this is a lot of fun. I love that about the Internet. When I'm asleep somebody in Australia can order a record."

ANDREW DANSBY
(June 1, 2001)