NASHVILLE—Dan Penn will release a new Christmas single this week. “One Blue Light” is a soulful journey down a gravel road in the country, that comes across a little house with a lone blue light shining in the window for Christmas. Dan is releasing this song in the run up to “Smoke Filled Room,” due out in Spring 2026.

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There aren’t many musical heroes like Dan Penn. In songwriting circles his name is as good as gold, and often platinum. And when it comes to those who can give life to the human spirit in song, it sometimes feels like Penn is traveling in a party of one. His voice sounds like it comes from the strong Southern soil in Alabama where he was born and raised, and then deepened in Memphis and Muscle Shoals. It is a true fact that when Dan Penn sings one of his own songs, something happens that is beyond sound. A light is turned on inside his listeners, and the world takes on an added dimension, and “One Blue Light,” is true to form.

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As a young tunesmith, his first songwriting hit was “Is a Bluebird Blue,” recorded by Conway Twitty in 1960. Penn had already recorded his own single, “Crazy Over You,” in the same year, but when he saw the possibilities of writing songs for others he could see a real career. He was offered $25 a week and never looked back. It wasn’t much longer before the young Alabaman saw the explosion of Rhythm & Blues happening in Muscle Shoals, not far from where he grew up in Vernon. Soon he’d found a new home. “You know, I made a handful of money,” he says, “even if it wasn’t a pocketful. When I told my father I was leaving Vernon and going to Muscle Shoals to be a songwriter, he said, ‘Well, I can get you $40 a week working with me in the factory here,’ but I said I was going to try the music thing. And he just said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you gotta do.’ I learned then sometimes it’s all about taking chances. That one has worked out okay.”

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It’s still working out okay. As with Penn’s soul music mega-hits in the 1960s, songs he co-wrote like “Do Right Woman,” “Dark End of the Street,” “I’m Your Puppet” and so many others, his music often offers a way to see beyond the trials of the present and offers a road to a new place. And like most good things in the modern world, it comes in the nick of time.

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In recent years, Dan Penn has been inducted into The Alabama Music Hall of Fame, The Memphis Music Hall of Fame, and The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a recipient of the Americana UK’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He will be performing and will be interviewed at a series of events November 13th-15th in conjunction with the Country Music Hall of Fame’s “Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising” exhibit, which runs through March 2026.

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In the mid-1990s Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham performed a special evening at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. Lou Reed was in the audience, and was so overcome by what he had heard that he approached Penn backstage and said, “If I had written a song as great as ‘I’m Your Puppet,’ I would have given up songwriting right then.”

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Find "One Blue Light" here: One Blue Light.

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