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Sharon Jones, Powerful Voice of Soul With the Dap-Kings, Dies at 60 Sharon Jones, Soul Singer With Dap-Kings, Dies at 60
(about 2 hours later)
Sharon Jones, the soul singer and powerful voice of the band the Dap-Kings, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer that had been in remission but returned last year. She was 60. Sharon Jones, a powerhouse soul singer with a gritty voice, fast feet and indomitable energy, died Friday of pancreatic cancer. She was 60.
Ms. Jones’s death was confirmed by Judy Miller Silverman, her publicist. She said Ms. Jones was surrounded by members of the Dap-Kings and other loved ones when she died. Her death was confirmed by Judy Miller Silverman, her publicist. She said Ms. Jones died at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., and was surrounded by members of her band, the Dap-Kings, and other loved ones when she died.
She continued performing throughout the summer, even while undergoing chemotherapy that she said caused neuropathy in her feet and legs and restricted her movements onstage. But Ms. Jones remained undeterred. Ms. Jones sang and shouted the kind of gospel-charged soul and funk she had grown up on. Her voice had bite, bluesiness, rhythmic savvy and a lifetime of conviction. She was backed by the Dap-Kings, the revivalist New York City R&B band that supplied her songs as she sparked their career.
“Getting out on that stage, that’s my therapy,” Ms. Jones said in a New York Times interview published in July. “You have to look at life the way it is. No one knows how long I have. But I have the strength now, and I want to continue.” She was discovered in 1996 by Gabriel Roth, a founder of the Brooklyn-based Daptone Records and the Dap-Kings’ bassist and main songwriter (under the name Bosco Mann). Ms. Jones had tried decades earlier to get a start in the music business, but was told by record labels that she didn’t have the looks to be a performer. Later, she would recall in the 2016 documentary “Miss Sharon Jones!,” the refrain became, “too short, too fat, too black and too old.”
The summer tour promoted “I’m Still Here,” a single with the Dap-Kings that detailed Ms. Jones’s birth in a brutally segregated South, a childhood in the burned-out Bronx, and a career hampered by record executives who considered her “too short, too fat, too black and too old.” But with the Dap-Kings — who sometimes introduced her as “110 pounds of soul excitement” — she became an unstoppable frontwoman. As she sang about love troubles, hard times and a woman’s strength, she would race across the stage in high heels — and sooner or later kick them off — while shouting and shimmying in fringed, sequined dresses.
Ms. Jones was that rare music star who found fame in middle age, when she was in her 40s. Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings worked their way up from clubs to theaters and festivals, and drew growing recognition from fellow musicians. At a 2011 concert in Paris, Prince showed up to play some guitar. In 2014, after chemotherapy sent her cancer into remission, Ms. Jones returned to performing with a show of undiminished energy as long as she could.
In addition to working as a correction officer at Rikers Island and an armed guard for Wells Fargo, Ms. Jones, who had grown up singing gospel in church choirs, initially dabbled in professional music as a session singer and the vocalist in a wedding band, Good N Plenty. Sharon Lafaye Jones was born on May 4, 1956, in Augusta, Ga., and spent her first years living across the state line in North Augusta, S.C. (Augusta, Ga., also nurtured one of her lifelong influences, James Brown.) She was the youngest of six children, and she is survived by four of them: Dora Jones, Isiah Jones, Henry Jones and Willian Stringer.
After meeting Gabriel Roth, the producer and songwriter also known as Bosco Mann, Ms. Jones made the leap from backup singer to main attraction. Desco Records released her debut 7-inch vinyl single, “Damn It’s Hot,” in 1996. She was 40. In 1960, she moved with her family to Brooklyn, growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant; later, she would write a song for a Christmas album called “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects.” She sang gospel music in church and soaked up James Brown, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Stax and Motown from the radio. From the 1970s on, she sang with funk bands and wedding bands, sang backup at recording sessions and led church choirs.
With the encouragement and songwriting of Mr. Roth, who co-founded the Brooklyn soul and funk revival label Daptone Records and serves as the bandleader of the Dap-Kings, Ms. Jones’s full-length debut, “Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,” came out in 2002. She would go on to release four more studio albums and two compilations on the small label, a point of pride for the fiercely independent Ms. Jones. To support herself, Ms. Jones worked as a prison guard at Rikers Island in the late 1980s and then as an armed security guard for Wells Fargo. At one recording session directly after work, she was still wearing her Wells Fargo uniform, complete with gun. It led to the title of one of her early singles, “Damn It’s Hot.”
“A major label’s going to do what?” she said to Billboard last year. “I sing one or two songs, they give me a few million dollars, which they’re going to want back, and then the next thing you know, the next record don’t sell, and then they’re kicking me to the curb. With us, this is our label, this is our project.” Mr. Roth heard her at a 1996 session backing the soul singer Lee Fields, and quickly began recording her through various labels he was associated with: Pure Records, Desco and then Daptone. The 2002 album “Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings” was Ms. Jones’s debut album and Daptone’s first album release.
Sharon Lafaye Jones was born on May 4, 1956, in Augusta, Ga., though her family lived just across the border in North Augusta, S.C. In “Miss Sharon Jones!” the singer recalled that her mother had needed a cesarean section, but because of segregation in the Jim Crow south, she was not allowed in the hospital’s main unit and was instead relegated to a storage room. Recording on vintage equipment with vintage instruments, Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings were leaders of a New York City-centered soul revival. The band’s sound got vastly more exposure when the producer Mark Ronson hired the Dap-Kings as the studio band for Amy Winehouse’s 2006 album “Back to Black.”
After her parents separated, Ms. Jones, the youngest of six children, moved with her mother to New York and was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “But New York in 1960, no peace to be found,” she sang on “I’m Still Here.” “Segregation, drugs and violence was all around.” But Ms. Jones was gaining notice, too. She played a juke joint singer in “The Great Debaters,” a 2007 film by Denzel Washington. When she and the Dap-Kings released their 2007 album, “100 Days, 100 Nights,” they performed at the Apollo Theater. Album by album and tour by tour, Ms. Jones’s audience and reputation grew. She toured with Lou Reed and sang with Phish and Michael Bublé.
She went on to attend Brooklyn College and acted in “Sister Salvation,” an Off-Broadway play, before turning her focus to music. But in 2013, as she prepared to release the album “Give the People What They Want,” she was diagnosed with stage 2 pancreatic cancer. She and the Dap-Kings performed on a float in the 2013 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade anyway. The album was postponed for a year while Ms. Jones underwent surgery and chemotherapy — a period documented by the director Barbara Kopple in “Miss Sharon Jones!”
With her late start, Ms. Jones recorded and performed at an unrelenting pace, and in the last year and a half of her life she made two albums, opened two national tours for Hall & Oates, was featured in a television commercial for Lincoln (performing the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider”) and starred in “Miss Sharon Jones!,” a documentary about her life. When Ms. Jones first returned to performing in 2014, she was bald. Her dancing would have sent any wig flying. “Give The People What They Want” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album.
The film traced her life from the diagnosis of Stage 2 pancreatic cancer in 2013 through her triumphant return to the stage in 2014. Ms. Jones is survived by four siblings, seven nieces and three nephews. By 2015, Ms. Jones and the band were fully back at work. They released a Christmas album, “It’s a Holiday Soul Party.” They toured with Hall & Oates and on their own. And they made a new single that’s heard in “Miss Sharon Jones!” called “I’m Still Here,” a bluesy musical autobiography . “I didn’t know if I would live to see another day,” Ms. Jones sang with a triumphal wail. “But I’m still here.”
“Sharon is always up,” the film’s director, Barbara Kopple, said at the time of its release. “Even when she’s in the room where people are getting chemo, she’s the sunshine.”
During her illness, Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings earned a Grammy nomination in 2015 for best R&B album with “Give the People What They Want.” (“Why is there not a category for soul?” Ms. Jones told Billboard at the time. “That’s my goal. Put me in the right category.”)
The singer, who also collaborated live and on tour with Lou Reed, Phish, Michael Bublé and David Byrne, publicly announced the return of her cancer in September 2015 at the film’s first showing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Doctors, she said, had found a spot on her liver. “I didn’t want people to come up and congratulate me on beating cancer when it’s back,” she said.
That recurrence was treated with chemotherapy. But in May, while she was on tour, cancer cells were found in her stomach, lymph nodes and lungs. Chemotherapy was required, although Ms. Jones changed the regimen to give her greater freedom of movement.
“I need to dance onstage,” she said. “I don’t want something that makes me bedridden. I want to live my life to the fullest.”