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2 8   C h ap t e r 3 The Road, the Tree, and Its Branches The success of the Hi label and Stan Kesler’s work with Sam the Sham were blips on the radar screen. They could easily be dismissed as novelties—Hi for its instrumentals and comic songs of the “Haunted House” variety, Sam’s records for their nonsense verses and the occasionally bizarre subject matter that reflected the interests of the singer. Chips Moman’s work with Sandy Posey and the Gentrys had drawn some notice, but he had not attained national significance. This changed when Jim Vienneau introduced him to a sound engineer/aspiring singer/recently successful songwriter who was on staff at Fame Studios at Muscle Shoals, Alabama . Directly and indirectly he would introduce Chips, a fledgling studio, and some incipient ideas to the attention of the entire South and then to the larger world. He was born Wallace Daniel Pennington in Vernon, Alabama, one of that state’s typical county-seat towns, not far from the Georgia border (on a longitudinal line with Chips’s hometown of LaGrange). He had a typical working-class Southern childhood and adolescence that he seemed to remember as nearly idyllic. “In my time, there was such a sweet period between ’58 and ’64,” he recalled longingly . Much has been written about the soft, ruminative quality of Dan’s voice (captured for all time on his live-in-concert CD, Moments from This Theater); not enough has been said about the content of his conversation, which mixed Southern inflections and good-ol’-boy aphorisms with sudden flashes of poetic elegance. If ever a man’s occupation could be discerned by his speech patterns, it would be Dan Penn’s; if ever a man could be described as a born writer, it was he. He was surrounded all his life by music; his father, like Bobby Wood’s, was a song leader in church and a singing-school director. Like many Southern teenagers of his era, he discovered black music from the late-night broadcasts of WLAC in Nashville, and he identified his favorites early on. “Ray Charles had my attention all his life; Ray Charles was the one who took all us white boys into the blues. He was the one we all emulated when we were all in our hometowns.” Bobby “Blue” Bland, based out of Memphis, was his other hero. “He was my second in line behind Ray Charles, and he’s awful close to it.” Between Ray Charles’ downhome melancholy and the sassiness of Bland is where the songs he was beginning to write would fall, and along the way he was developing a rare sensitivity to R&B. “I used to have an affinity for the black race, I really did,” he reflected. ”Everything out of N’Orleans I just loved. I used to, I wouldn’t even listen to you if you weren’t black, I’m sorry.” At the age of fifteen, he joined a band that alternated between rock and roll and square-dance music, which meant that he inevitably absorbed some of the formula for traditional country, despite his open dislike of it. “My heroes all come from the funky side of the tracks, there wasn’t too much country music that seeped into my soul,” he said. By the age of eighteen, he had been invited up to North Alabama by his former bandmate , Billy Sherrill; by the age of twenty, he was an integral part of, and founding member of, the Muscle Shoals recording scene. The story of Muscle Shoals is often told, but it bears repeating. Two songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill, began noticing that North Alabama was becoming a magnet for musical and songwriting talent from all over the state (and since both of them were dance-hall veterans , they already had a line on who most of them were). Why not, they reasoned, let the players and writers work on demos close to home, instead of having to go all the way to Atlanta or Nashville to record them or find a publisher ? Their idea of a demo studio did not get T h e R o a d , t h e T r e e , a n d I t s B r a n c h e s    2 9 far until they found a backer in Tom Stafford, a local pharmacist’s son and town eccentric who already ran the movie theater in...

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