When Sharon Jones first beat pancreatic cancer into remission about two years ago, it felt like exactly how her story should go. She’d spent decades grinding away, supplementing wedding band gigs and session work with stints as a Rikers Island corrections officer and a Wells Fargo security guard. Jones was 40 when she connected with Brooklyn-based soul revivalist Gabriel Roth, in 1996, and after years of lukewarm reception by the music industry for being, as she recalled in this year’s documentary Miss Sharon Jones!“too short, too fat, too black and too old,” Roth was finally the enthusiastic buyer for what Jones was selling.
When Roth launched Daptone Records in 2002, after several years of working with Jones on retro-R&B projects for labels like the French indie Pure and Daptone predecessor Desco, Sharon was its centerpiece. Her debut with Roth’s throwback-soul ensemble the Dap Kings, Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, was its first full-length release. Jones’ voice was well-burnished by experience, gritty with conviction and muscle. She and her mighty band quickly packed ever-bigger houses and landed plum festival slots. They earned their first Grammy nomination. Prince surprised her, by turning up onstage during a Paris show.
It was great music and also a great American tale—the post-midlife, against-the-odds triumph, where talent and spirit were rewarded over artifice. What a well-deserved ascent, maybe even sweeter for how long it was delayed. Then, in September 2015, Jones’ cancer returned. She’d picked up momentum at 40, and succumbed to her illness at 60. In essence, she only got to live the middle part of a career in the spotlight. What a bunch of bullshit.
But Jones, who had fought a lot of things and won, was too tough and big-hearted to lie down right away. She spent the last year of her life alternating between treatment and touring, delivering performances at the same level of ferocity as ever. Onstage, she was a sweaty and magnetic force of pure life, an explosion of shout and shimmy, launching even the most blasé indie-rock audiences onto their feet.
Jones—and Daptone—were at the forefront of a new-millennium vogue for vintage-styled hot soul and throbbing funk. Some artists whose stars rose with the revival, like Jones, and her eventual Daptone labelmate, the former James Brown impersonator Charles Bradley, remembered the sounds from the first time around. Others, including Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Alabama Shakes, Mayer Hawthorne, Leon Bridges, and others, were turning the pages of their history books and reporting back with slick Hammond organ, sharp horn sections, hip-tickling grooves, gospel-toned shouts, and sweetly yearning ballads to make you sway. It was music for dancing, and it filled up the floor again in the halls of rock’n’roll.
Love for old-school soul and R&B certainly always smoldered in the margins, stoked by collectors and champions of all ages. Significant among them was Norton Records’ Billy Miller, who also died too young this month, at 62. Alongside raw garage-rock obscurities, the cult-favorite label that he ran with his wife, early Cramps drummer Miriam Linna, reissued New Orleans piano-pounder Esquerita and worked with Detroit soul veteran Andre Williams, among others. Older audiences, too, carried the torch at venerable events like New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival, which in April 2016 was the venue for one of Jones’ last shows. It was her fourth or fifth time returning to the fest, which is well known for legacy funk, soul, and blues acts.
“If there’s any festival in the world that crowd is already at, it’s Jazz Fest,” Quint Davis, the festival’s producer and director, tells Pitchfork. “We’re steeped in R&B singers with horn bands. Now there’s this new wave of them—the Broken Bones, the California Honeydrops, Nathaniel Rateliff. Sharon was in front of all that.” Davis, who has been involved with the festival since the first one in 1970, thinks Sharon Jones stacks up with the best of the originals. He held her slot at this year’s festival for close to a year, hoping that her health would let her perform.
“She’s like one of the original missing links to Otis Redding,” he said, “a classic, powerhouse singer with her own unique thing, incredibly infectious, for real. Her personality and her enthusiasm for what she was doing was so strong—it shone through everything. And she was relentless. She hung on until she got the people frenzied, and I mean every time. She was a power source.”
That internal well of soul power might have—definitely should have—boosted Sharon Jones onto the charts anyway, but it certainly helped that in 2006, right before the release of their acclaimed album 100 Days, 100 Nights, the Dap-Kings lent their signature groove to Amy Winehouse’s blockbuster Back to Black. The New York-based DJ Jonathan Toubin, whose Soul Clap DJ night now tours the world (and who curated several soul compilations under that name for Norton Records), remembers those two releases as incredibly impactful.
“When I started my Soul Clap ten years ago, Amy Winehouse, with the help of Daptone, got people very excited about the label and soul music in general. So when 100 Days dropped, Sharon Jones instantly became one of the most requested artists,” Toubin wrote to Pitchfork. Now more or less ubiquitous, soul-vinyl DJ and dance nights were at that time (at least in NYC) mostly havens for collectors of Northern soul obscurities, according to Toubin. Jones’ rise brought the sound to a much larger audience, which Toubin found gathered on his dancefloor. “I think it would be safe to say that Sharon Jones helped bring an entire generation into soul music,” he added.
Jones’ death is the latest in a string of losses that’s made 2016, at this point, seem almost comically cruel to lovers of music. Two artists who preceded her in their departures to the great beyond this year, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, left behind final works that considered death, in essence building themselves their own great, final memorial monuments in art.
Jones also knew her time might be short; she traveled with the specter of death at her side for almost four years. She had time to get to know it, maybe to accept the idea of it, even though it had turned up way ahead of a reasonable schedule. And in her way, by continuing to take the stage and give it her all—shoes kicked off and everything, so she could run—Jones was also spending the end of her career engaging with death. She was telling it to sit down for a minute so she could ask us all to dance, just one more time.