MISS SHARON JONES!

Posted February 22, 2017 by qotsm in Arts & Entertainment

Starting her recording career when most artists start to fade, the late-in-life success of singer Sharon Jones was one of those things that made people believe talent conquers all and, sometimes the good guys actually win. However, rather than focus on her miraculous metamorphosis from prison guard to festival playing soul sensation, the documentary Miss Sharon Jones! chronicles her battle with cancer, which would ultimately take her life a year after the movie was released.

Once told by a record executive that she was “Too fat, too black, too short and too old” for a career in music, Jones was almost 40 when she was discovered by Gabriel Roth A.K.A. Bosco Mann, founder of Daptone Records. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised just over the South Carolina border, her family later moved to Brooklyn’s infamous Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The first of her family to attend college, she eventually became a corrections officer at New York City’s Rikers Island jail, and after that, a guard on an armored car for Wells Fargo bank.

Jones was known for singing in church, in wedding bands, and doing session work. It was at a backing vocal session for old school soul & funk singer Lee Fields that she hooked up with Roth, who would soon launch the Daptone Records label, which placed a premium on retro soul, funk grooves and analog recording. Jones would become the label’s flagship artist, backed by The Dap-Kings, who famously also played on Amy Winehouse’s landmark Back To Black album.

Sharon’s unmistakable vocals often gave way to her gospel roots. Her inflection and vocal phrasing and styling made you know she was familiar with the kind of blues you have to live in order to sing the way she did. Her impeccable live performances, where she would invariably kick off her shoes and dance to packed concert halls, eventually earned her the reputation as “The Female James Brown.”

“I feel my day is coming,” Jones says at the start of Miss Sharon Jones!. Fast forward to late 2013, and we are introduced to a more subdued Sharon as she comes near the end of a round of chemotherapy to treat stage II pancreatic cancer. She had been diagnosed the previous January. She takes us along as she goes to have her head shaved, as the last of her braids falls out. This is the result of the radiation that has been introduced to her body in hopes to kill the disease. It’s a heart-wrenching scene for anyone who has ever lived through the indignities the treatment inflicts on people. Jones tries to make the best of it, asking the man shaving her bald, “Do I have a pretty shaped head?” She may take it in stride and call it “another chapter,” but it’s apparent the experience is difficult, as the tears start to stream down her face.

Jones recuperates in upstate New York at the home of friend and holistic healer Megan Holken. Holken is one of many people in Jones’ circle who are clearly devoted to her, including her managers Alex Kadvan and Austen Holman, and the members of The Dap-Kings. The devotion is reciprocal, as Jones helped build Daptone’s recording studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She describes the men that make up the group “the only family I got.” Not only is Jones’ health a concern, so is the financial well-being of the band and label. “I’m responsible for everybody’s payroll,” she says at one point, weighted down with the burden. Realistically speaking, if there is no Sharon Jones, there cannot be a “Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings.”

As Jones’ chemo nears its end date, she visits her real family down south, and takes time to visit the James Brown exhibit at the Augusta Museum of History. She says meeting Brown years earlier was one of her most memorable moments. While visiting her hometown, she can’t help but reflect on the everyday racism she grew up with in the South. It reminds her of the hurdles she’s already overcome in life. Thinking back on her musical career, she says her earliest goal was simply “to get my mother out of the projects.”

Beating cancer is a slow and arduous process and Miss Sharon Jones! doesn’t sugar coat the experience. After completing chemotherapy, there’s a stomach cancer scare, and Jones clearly struggles building up the strength to perform a February 2014 show. Dap-Kings guitarist Binky Griptite says at one point “She needs the show. That’s the best therapy she can have,” and Jones seems to agree. “When we’re on that stage and that music is out there I have no worries in the world,” she says, “I don’t think about anything, any pain. Sure there’s death but people came to see us and the show must go on.”

While Jones’ February 6, 2014 performance at New York’s Beacon Theater is a celebration of her determination, it was clearly not easy. She’s a bundle of nerves before the show. She’s self-conscious about her appearance and baldness. She’s worried she’ll forget the words, which she does at times, and concerned about her legs getting tired while executing her signature dance moves. Though the show is ultimately a triumph, it takes every bit of physical and mental strength for her to get through it. And then, unbelievably, she summons the energy to go on tour… a world tour!

The movie ends a year later, following another cancer scare that resulted in part of her liver being removed. While Jones is now resigned to the fact that, “cancer is in your body and it never leaves,” she still obviously finds her ultimate healing on the stage, performing a homecoming show in Augusta in February 2015, a month after her liver surgery. Now with about an inch of hair on her head, she dances like the Sharon Jones of old, kicking off her shoes while singing with undiminished vocal power.

Miss Sharon Jones! is a portrait of a woman battling cancer, more than it is a musical documentary or profile piece. It is bravely unsentimental and avoids cheap clichés about the triumph of will and all good things happen to those who deserve it. Jones fights her way to the end of the movie, and there is a victory, but it also takes a very real toll, and you’re never really certain she’s going to make it. Watching this film is all the more powerful when you know that Jones’ cancer returned in late 2015. Even so, she pushed on, resumed treatment and kept going. After all, she had a documentary to promote. She wanted the world to know that while there were definitely moments when she was down, she refused to be counted out.

Quiet on the Set Magazine caught up with her in June, 2016. She was upbeat at a screening of her documentary. Clearly, she was happy to be there, taking pictures, greeting her fans, and agreeing to sit down for an interview with us. Unfortunately, we never got that opportunity. She suffered a stroke on election night, which she joked was “the result of seeing Donald Trump win.”

Sharon Jones died at the age of 60 on November 18, 2016, surrounded by the members of her family…The Dap-Kings. It was a privilege to meet this brave and talented woman. May she rest in peace, and may her musical legacy live on forever.