published 4/10/26
This here is about one, 1930s, 4’10” baby grand Apollo piano. Actually, it’s about two, 1930s, 4’10” baby grand pianos and a 1960s era, 64 note Wurlitzer 140B electric piano. But really, this whole thing is about one recording; even more specifically, two musicians on that recording. The music is “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),” and the musicians are Spooner Oldham and Aretha Franklin.
There are other people, many others, there and around the south, like Dan Penn, writers, producers, arrangers, performers, generally congregating in places like Memphis, Macon, Muscle Shoals. Places that revealed to the record labels in NYC a way of putting music together that, consciously or not, revitalized their approach to recording.
Ronnie Shannon, a songwriter with scant biographical information online, and like Aretha hailed from Detroit, composed what turned out to be one of the most consequential catalysts to the beginning of a major turning point in modern American recorded music. The story that surrounds that shipwrecked first session lives on as one of lore, forever replayed in the history books.
A demo of the song, which sounds more like a working rehearsal version, is found here. Note how the piano leads the opening ostinato.
I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) (Demo) – YouTube
But this story isn’t so much about the song itself, although the thing that signifies everything in the story is the song. This is the story of my own experience, after years of listening, hearing a piano, nestled within a ensemble initially lofted and volleyed by that Wurlitzer, anew, as if I had never heard it before, as if it were the first time.
I don’t know when I first became aware of Aretha. She was always just ever-present, similar to Ray Charles in the crisscrossing of music and popular culture, a part of the day-to-day routine. I don’t know if there was ever a formal introduction. There was a tv commercial that portrays her as a healthcare assistant singing through the intercom because that’s just so naturally what she does. It is a marvel of the human voice; one that one could take for granted and at the same time be re-reminded of just how marvelous it is.
I must have first read Dan Penn’s name in Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, or on the liner notes as a songwriter for “Dark End of the Street,” but it turned out there were multiple intersections of Dan’s songwriting or role as a producer in my music explorations. In 2016 I made a professional connection by tuning Dan’s home studio piano. I should mention that I became a piano technician after moving to Nashville in 2009.
Dan and Spooner, two childhood friends, have performed as a duo probably since they were teenagers or earlier, but most notably on a 1999 release entitled Moments from This Theater recorded in front of an audience in Dublin. They had been musical partners for about two thirds of their lives up to that point. Today it’s more like five sixths. But, with access to the internet, you can watch them perform this brilliant set from a quarter century ago on YouTube any time.
Relaxed, laid back, unhurried, the songs, groomed, with nothing more to prove except the conviction of it. Even when they’re about being in wrong situations, they’re in the right place, and so are you. They sit, Dan on the right, Spooner the left, and the music sounds of four voices: Spooner’s left hand on the low end, his right hand with staccato accentuations, and Dan’s voice and guitar, a croon over steady, but ever so funky, arpeggiated strums, words rife with meaning. My attention gravitated primarily to Dan, and there is a lot more to say here, about Dan Penn and my own nascent experiences as a piano technician in Music City, but that will have to be for another time.
In July of 2025, after living in Nashville for 16 years and in Boston for 9 years prior, I flew back to my hometown of Evanston, IL to watch Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham play at SPACE, a venue built at the back of an upscale pizzaria, a modest yet prestigious venue that many local Chicago musicians view as a destination gig for the suburbs. When it first opened in 2008, one needed to walk through the restaurant to get to the back. Since then, they expanded the seating, took out the bar, adding as many tables and standing room only spots as possible, presumably. No longer were pizza smells wafting as a prelude, now a separate side entrance and waiting area reminded me again how beholden to change we humans are.
During the show, Dan does almost of the talking and singing, introducing the songs, telling a few stories, coyly forgetting Alex Chilton’s name while leading the audience in an a cappella version of “The Letter,” and generally letting it all hang out. Spooner, next to Dan, is more diffident, though not from insecurity. He takes the lead on “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers,” adds harmonies to many of Dan’s leads, but like an invisible guiding force, completes the sound so that nothing is missing.
And besides an appearance at the New Orleans Jazz Fest a couple months prior, Dan and Spooner did not have anything more scheduled, that is, until the end of the year when they announced a show at the City Winery, Nashville in January. I pounced on a ticket, nabbing the last of the stage-side table seats. I figured, since it was not that much extra, and since I had watched them standing up from the back of SPACE, I had earned some fandom. I had paid my dues.
The timing, here, was everything. The venue is just a 15 mins downhill drive from where I live, and my last minute arrival – literally with one minute to spare – after being escorted to the front and seated just as Spooner was walking on stage sitting down and starting to play. But instead of their usual spots on stage from the Dublin and Evanston shows (check YouTube if you don’t believe me), they were now swapped with Dan on the left and Spooner on the right, which, from these seemingly disparate machinations (at least from my own egotistic perspective), resulted in Spooner sitting almost directly in front of me. Dan then comes on stage, but my attention from that point was transfixed by Spooner. On how he kept adjusting his mic which clearly needed tightening (fixed during intermission by a stage assistant, presumably). On how big his ears were, physically and metaphorically. And on his instrument. I was drawn closer to that Wurlitzer, a modestly ranged, dark but punchy electrified reed keyboard that would have proselytized the Egyptians, Greek and Romans alike, more than ever wanting to crawl underneath just to feel his notes more closely. Little fills. Held phrases. Bass runs. Loose to the point where at times it felt they could have just stopped playing and the echo of their groove would go on, exist in the air, that at any moment the whole thing could just dissolve, and yet it didn’t, they played on. Leaning back in my chair I felt a strange sense of beholding something sacred. Perhaps this is how it feels walking through the Sistine Chapel.
That’s the first part. The second occurred just a couple weeks later, when I encountered two 1930s 4’10” Apollo pianos within several hours. With no forewarning, I arrived at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to catch the last day of the pay-what-you-want pricing for locals. In it, I was treated to story the of Muscle Shoals, with a faux wood panelling entrance and, at the center of it, the 4’10” baby grand Apollo that Aretha played at FAME Studios on her Atlantic debut.
What happened during that session remains the stuff of legend, and probably contains its own Rashomon-like prism from which no singular version of the story can escape. But whatever happened or didn’t happen, the thing fell apart with only one and a half tracks completed, the aforementioned “Never Loved a Man,” and a partial version of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” The way Dan tells it, the musicians were dinking around, needed a spark, which finally came from Spooner (seemingly adapting his Wurli line from the piano part in the demo), a pulsing ostinato with a plodding gospel lilt. There is nothing extraordinarily innovative about the pattern being played. The song is in a 3/4 or 6/8 time, depending on how it’s counted, but the first chord is held out in such a way that the ear maybe doesn’t quite grasp the feel until the very end of the phrase. Then the fingers quickly jump for a chorale-like I7-IV cadence. Spooner, whether by design or happenstance, lights the flame of the song, inviting Aretha’s voice, which begins to recognize and move beyond itself. After 9 albums on Columbia invoking Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke, her father, sisters, and many others, but perhaps not yet invoking a conscious sound, one personal to her, but now, finally, a new direction, an instrument more aware of itself than ever.
But only a few brief flashes of that scene replayed in my mind, for later that morning I drove 45 mins north of Nashville to service a piano I tuned back in 2021. I had it my notes that it was Wurlitzer acoustic piano (the same company that made Spooner’s 140B some 30 years later), but I had erred in my note taking. It was an Apollo! And happened to be the very same model as the one displayed at the museum, Aretha’s piano. Perhaps my errant note taking was based on serial number (there were no American made Apollos listed in the piano atlas), as well as a physical resemblance, but after more research discovered the connection: in the 1920s, Wurlitzer acquired Melville Clark which had manufactured Apollo. I forensically scanned my photos from that morning. My client’s Apollo, made in 1932, had the same modest pedal design as the one played by Aretha at FAME. It was, without proof, a perfect match.
A 4’10” piano is the smallest grand piano. The size correlates mostly with the amount of potential bass frequencies in the low strings; smaller pianos have a more limited low end than larger ones. The midrange tones is where the ear goes. Mids (the frequencies) imply notes both below and above. The tone of higher notes varies greatly piano to piano. The human brain and body sense something after striking the key, throwing the hammer, the excited strings moving energy to the soundboard through the bridge, a sensation in one flick, a response. I wish I could describe the minutiae and mundane effect that tuning a piano has on the ear. Half hearing things, half tuning out, but learning how to categorize sound and attempt at dissecting its elements. But now, in the end, after tuning this here Apollo in the field, after grasping the significance of the sound of this particular model of a piano, I felt like I could now hear this piano. I use the past tense because I could not recreate the sound if I tried. I could only recognize it.
And I put the song on driving home.
And there’s Spooner, laying the foundation once more, with those crisp Wurlitzer electrified reeds, bedding and bending the sound, giving a setting, opening it to a voice that now heard more, conveyed more. A voice that widened the sound that we would hear.
And there’s Aretha’s piano playing in the pre-chorus, cutting through in octaves, middle C and the octave above, a call and response between voice and instruments, between her and her own instrument, building to the nexus of the song, when the instruments drop and only voices, slow and together, remain.
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