****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Dan Penn’s Do Right Man is an album out of time, and thus, requiring attention time and again. Penn may not be a household name, but his songs are familiar, feel familiar, and hit home every time.It is difficult to believe that this album was released in 1994. In 1994, grunge’s first wave was in its waning days, pop was doing its pop thing, rap was in the process of taking over popular music, and Dan Penn came along and finally recorded Do Right Man. He had been kicking around Alabama for a long time, with hints of blue eyed soul, a bit of front porch folk, and generally speaking, his own thing. His songs were around, but this album needed to come out. It could have come out decades earlier and sounded perfectly at home. Decades later, it still sounds timeless. Muscle Shoals soul at its best, stripped down to the essentials.There had been Tony Joe White, with a bit more swampy blues, and plenty of others, but nobody else really hit that sweet spot that Dan could hit with Dark End Of The Street. Sure, others had covered it, including Richard Thompson, but Dan wrote it. It’s his. You need to hear him do it. It just took time, as it sometimes does.Yet so many of the best knew about Dan anyway. His influence has been on the upswing of late. You can hear it in people like JJ Grey, not to mention his general influence on Muscle Shoals. Yet for all that, somehow one can forget that Do Right Man didn’t come out until 1994. Hopefully people at least remember it, or come around to it. It is one of those classics that just exists outside of time, on the power of Dan’s performance, the writing, the presentation…Really? This was 1994? Strange.
