POWERHOUSE SINGER BROUGHT A BIG VOICE
Soul and survival went hand in hand for Jones, whose strong soulful vocals fronted Dap-Kings
Sharon Jones, the stout powerhouse who shepherded a soul revival despite not finding stardom until middle age, has died. She was 60.
Jones’ representative, Judy Miller Silverman, said Jones died Nov. 18 at a Cooperstown, N.Y., hospital after battling pancreatic cancer. Loved ones and members of her retro-soul band, the Dap-Kings, were among those surrounding her, Silverman said.
The story of Jones’ battle with cancer, first diagnosed in 2013, was told in Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Miss Sharon Jones! released earlier this year. Though she triumphantly returned to the stage in 2015 after the cancer went into remission, Jones announced its return late last year.
Still, she mounted another comeback with the defiant single I’m Still Here and hit the road again this summer with the Dap-Kings while undergoing chemotherapy.
“You’ve got to be brave,” a debilitated Jones told The Associated Press in July between tour stops. “I want to use the time that I have. I don’t want to spend it all laid up, wishing I had done that gig.”
Jones’ death was noted on social media and throughout the music industry. Producer Mark Ronson, who brought the Dap-Kings as backing band to Amy Winehouse on her breakthrough album, Back to Black, said, “Sharon Jones had one of the most magnificent, gutwrenching voices of anyone in recent time.”
The youngest of six children, Sharon Lafaye Jones was born May 4, 1956, in Augusta, Ga. Her family lived in nearby North Augusta, S.C., across the Savannah River from the birthplace of James Brown. Jones grew up idolizing the Godfather of Soul and would later be frequently tagged “the female James Brown.”
But for decades, such a fate was unimaginable. On I’m Still Here, she sings of being turned down by music executives for being “too short, too fat, too black and too old.”
After growing up in Brooklyn (her mother had moved to escape an abusive husband), Jones regularly sang gospel at her church, performed for years in a wedding band and sang backup for various session bands. To make ends meet, she worked as a corrections officer and was a bank security guard.
But in one recording session, she caught the attention of Gabriel Roth and Philip Lehman. The two, blown away by Jones’ fiery voice, made her the lead singer of their newly formed Dap-Kings and launched the Bushwick, Brooklynbased label, Daptone Records, around her unlikely star power.
They debuted with 2002’s DapDippin’ With Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, released when Jones was 46. Three more albums followed in the ensuing decade, and two compilations.
The sound, backed by walls of horns and tightly guided by bandleader Roth, was propelled by Jones’ grit and ferocity.
Jones never disparaged the better-selling British soul revival led by Ronson and Winehouse that coincided with her rise. But she wasn’t shy about claiming to be the more genuine article.
“We’ve been there, and we’re still doin’ this,” Jones told New York magazine in 2010. “In another few years, what are they gonna be doin’?”
Their sixth album, Give the People What They Want, earned Jones her first Grammy nomination for best R&B album. Their last album, It’s a Holiday Soul Party, was released last year.