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Our continually-growing Songwriter Series goes south of the Mason-Dixon line with a long-overdue salute to two gentlemen whose names are synonymous with Southern Soul – but whose work, as this collection reveals, also extends into the realms of country, pop and Southern Rock.

Many great writers emerged out of the Muscle Shoals music scene of the 1960s but few of them made quite the impact on popular music of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. Prolific together and apart, the two men are responsible for innumerable Hall-Of-Fame classics.

Sweet Inspiration gathers up two dozen of their finest co-creations and demonstrates that they are fully deserving of the kind of accolades that they have always received from soul fans and that, in recent years, they have been afforded by a much broader spectrum of music lovers and music writers.

It's astonishing to think that most of these songs were written in a period of not much more than two years, and that both men were also collaborating with other Shoals writers during the same timeframe.

A future follow-up volume will showcase Dan's collaborations with others. For now, though, we invite you to enjoy the songs of Penn and Oldham as rendered by names as famous as Charlie Rich, Percy Sledge and Etta James and as obscure as Art Freeman and Jeanne Newman.

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