We characterize the subexponential densities on $(0,\infty)$ for compound Poisson distributions on $[0,\infty)$ with absolutely continuous Lévy measures. As a corollary, we show that the class of all subexponential probability density functions on $\mathbb R_+$ is closed under generalized convolution roots of compound Poisson sums. Moreover, we give an application to the subexponential density on $(0,\infty)$ for the distribution of the supremum of a random walk.