Sharon Jones: Battling Cancer with Christmas Soul
The Dap-Kings vocalist delivers the funkiest holiday album, despite a challenging fight with an incurable disease
“I’ve got one more treatment to go, which is tomorrow. Honestly, inside my hands and under my feet are black, my tongue has black spots and there are sores inside my jaw and mouth. My face is even two shades darker than normal. I don’t like the way I look, but it’s who I am,” 59 year-old-singer Sharon Jones tells me of her recently returned cancer in a somber voice, but not before looking at the brighter side of things. “My voice is great and I got my energy. I always tell people I give it 110%. I don’t have 110%, I’m about 75–80%. But I go out and do my job. It makes me happy, it’s inspirational.”
The job she speaks of is being the lead vocalist for Brooklyn-based modern day retro funk & soul band Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. The group formed in 2001, made up of former musicians from the Soul Providers and the Mighty Imperials, releasing music on 7" vinyl singles that spun at 45 revolutions per minute. Sharon worked with the Soul Providers in the early years on Desco Records, where together they were fooling the record collecting community into thinking that their then new recordings were actually undiscovered crate-dug gems from the 70s. They did this by deliberately leaving the date off of the vinyl’s center labels.
But the band is perhaps most famous for backing Amy Winehouse on her seminal sophomore LP, Back to Black, not to mention collaborating and performing regularly with Mark Ronson, even lending some horns to the recording of his billion-view smash, “Uptown Funk.” There were no hard feelings between Sharon and the band when they wanted to back Winehouse for her album and first U.S. tour.
“The guys came in like ‘Uh, Sharon if you don’t mind, uh…we’re going to backing up this British singer and she’s going to singing this soul stuff…’ and I was like ‘I don’t care! Do whatever ya’ll gotta do!’ And everything worked out because we weren’t touring or on the road, and then I got to do stuff with Lou Reed and Denzel Washington. So at that point in time everybody was doing something,” says Sharon. “I got to meet Amy and we talked about doing some stuff and the Dap-Kings helped write a couple of songs with her in the studio. I wish I could have gotten through to her like a big sister, but nobody can get to anyone when they got that kind of money coming in, with people all around. She was very shy. One thing she did tell me is that she didn’t want to sing. She wanted to be happy, be married and have children.”
Six albums deep, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are still relatively unsung heroes, despite having recorded on some of the biggest songs of the last decade. But last year they were nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Album with Give the People What They Want. One could even argue that the band is partially responsible for ushering in this era’s brand of “pastiche pop” that has extended to other throwback crossover songs like Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” or Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” in addition to Back to Black and “Uptown Funk.”
“I’m just happy that people know that we are the ones behind this and are the backbone of it. I just get annoyed when they call British artists like Adele a ‘soul singer,’ when they are pop singers. They need a category for ‘soul,’ and we’ll be at the top of that. All this other stuff is not soul music. Even R&B nowadays is pop. There’s no more rhythm & blues, it’s pop. To see all of that, it’s a little annoying,” says Sharon. “I’m still waiting for us to sell our first million albums. You know why? Because they don’t play us on major stations. We get played on NPR and college stations, thank God. The major stations probably play 20 different songs throughout the day, over and over again. Back in the day in the 60s, you heard everybody’s songs. I listened to James Brown, Otis Redding, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bing Crosby, we listened to everything. Even if you were down in the 200 or 300 range on Billboard’s chart, they’d play it every once in awhile. It is what it is. I’m glad we’re doing what we’re doing and we’re going to continue to do it. And maybe with my documentary and the Christmas album, more people will hear us and we’ll get our first million sold.”
Christmas album? This season Sharon and the band released a holiday long-player of funky Christmas songs called It’s a Holiday Soul Party.
“We’ve been wanting to do a holiday record for the longest time. At least the last ten years, we just never got around to it. Then finally, once I did ‘Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects’ last year, we just said ‘‘Hey, let’s do some more Christmas stuff. Let’s do some traditional songs and change them around and write a couple.’ We put love into that album,” says Sharon.
The album is delightfully fun, with horny horns, fat grooves and skull snapping drums — not to mention Sharon’s rich vocals — sounding much like the vintage records that hip-hop producers like Kanye West, RZA or Marley Marl would mine for samples. It’s safe to say that this is the funkiest Christmas record since, well, James Brown’s Funky Christmas compilation released in 1995, which was made up of the best cuts from his trinity of holiday records released in the late 60s/early 70s.
“I know they call me the female James Brown, but I can’t be doing no splits,” laughs Sharon. “His Christmas songs we’ve all listened to, so of course we were thinking about that. That’s why I think Homer [Steinweiss] came up with ‘Just Another Christmas Song,’ with me just changing those original songs around. I grew up listening to those James Brown songs like ‘Backdoor Santa’ and all that stuff, I love those songs. Even the Jackson 5 Christmas album in the late 60s. So when we came to do these songs, we were like ‘What can we do now, in this time period?’”
The album features original new tunes like the aforementioned, cleverly-penned conceptual cuts “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” and “Just Another Christmas Song,” as well as instantly likable new takes on old standards. “Silent Night” is given a bluesey makeover, while both “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells” are up-tempo and even danceable, each far from the sleep inducing traditional versions sung by Perry Como or whomever. There’s even a Hanukkah song that kicks the entire album off.
“I was like, ‘Hanukkah, what do ya’ll do these days?’ And they broke it down. They got me using words like ‘menorah’ and ‘gimel’. It was fun doing it,” laughs Sharon.
Sharon’s warm sense of humor comes through when she tells stories and she’ll instantly break into song during the middle of a conversation when explaining her recording process. It is clear that she keeps a positive attitude even in the face of an incurable disease. In September, at the screening of her Barbara Kopple directed documentary Miss Sharon Jones! at the Toronto International Film Festival, she revealed that the cancer had returned to her body, after she beat pancreatic cancer in 2013. She screened the documentary last Thursday at DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, one day she after she went in for her final chemotherapy treatment.
“They are shrinking them down and they will be removed with lasers. People don’t realize that just last December that I had a tumor on my liver and in January they removed it over night. Six months later — in June — it had grown back in three different spots. It’s the same cancer, pancreatic cancer, but it came back on my liver. I’m just thanking God that they can remove it and my liver can replenish itself,” says Sharon.
“Even Al and the band are like ‘Oh you look great! You’re doing great’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, I’ve put on a lot,’ and when I went on the stage, I told my fans that I take my shoes off because my feet are so tender now that I have problems zipping my zipper down. That’s how sore my hands and feet are. So I walk out in heels, but then I put on my little wedges so I can have my comfy shoes and I can dance better in those. I can’t even be barefoot on the stage because the coldness. I’m sensitive to it,” she continues. “I let my fans know, I say ‘You see my hands? This is not dirt. My feet are clean.’ People say ‘You don’t have to tell people that,’ and I say ‘Yes I do! I feel very uncomfortable like this!’ If I don’t tell them, I don’t want people in front that don’t know about me saying ‘Did you see how dirty her feet were?’ Or some newsman taking pictures of my feet. I mean it’s bad! But you know what? I can sing. I’m still moving and I’ll get over it. I’m doing my shows. If that’s my only complaint — darkness in my hands and feet and soreness — then that’s okay”
“I told my manager, ‘Don’t cancel any gigs,’ because it wasn’t as bad as it was in 2013. They cut me open, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t even breathe hardly. This was different. I’m glad everything worked for me. I have my faith,” she concludes. “God gave me these gifts, not to take them away.”
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