Sharon Jones.Jake Chessum
Every album Sharon Jones recorded was better than the last. But if you didn't know the story behind Soul of a Woman – out Nov. 17, one year less a day from her passing – you'd never guess that it captured some of the last breaths of a dying woman. The posthumous release by this American soul singer is full of the fire and energy her audience had come to expect.
A late bloomer, Jones found herself on a path toward success in 1996, at 40, with a group of young musicians called the Dap-Kings, who were thrilled to discover a gospel-trained singer who was as invigorating a performer as she was a vocalist. As her reputation grew, Prince, Lou Reed and Michael Bublé were all honoured to work with her. In 2006, Amy Winehouse may have borrowed the Dap-Kings to make Back to Black, but Jones's band stuck with her until her final days in hospital. She died of a stroke, at 60, after two bouts with pancreatic cancer.
After the first bout, which postponed the release of Give the People What They Want until January, 2014, Jones was bedridden for 10 months. "She had the Whipple procedure, which is a very, very intense surgery," says Dap-Kings bandleader Gabe Roth. "They cut half your stomach up and all these other different parts and sew you back up together. There's a lot of recovery required. She was miserable. She had a really hard time connecting with her source of power, which was music, people, rhythm."
Once in remission, she went back on the road: bald, no wig, not concealing the ordeal she'd been through.
When cancer returned in 2015, she decided to stay on the road – even while doing chemotherapy. It's a final lap that exceeds even Gord Downie's: His final tour was 15 dates, ending more than a year before he died. Sharon Jones played 30 shows in 2016, the final one in September, two months before her death. "There were a lot of voices – friends, family – telling her not to push herself, not to go on the road, to rest," says Roth, in a story that will sound familiar to anyone who's seen the Tragically Hip documentary, Long Time Running – or similar documentaries about Glen Campbell and Spirit of the West's John Mann and how those two men embarked on final tours with advanced Alzheimer's. "There was a side to it that we all understood, and that she made very clear, that being on stage and singing was when she felt best. That was her therapy: getting on stage and connecting with people, looking them in the eye, feeling the music in her body. That was what gave her strength. That's where she wanted to be."
It wasn't an easy place to be. "She'd be in pain backstage and having a hard time walking or eating or talking," says Roth. "We'd be really concerned. Then we'd get onstage and she'd somehow connect to the music and the audience and summon this energy, this power, out of what seemed like thin air. Vocally, she was getting stronger and stronger. As someone who's been standing behind her for 20 years, I was still amazed at the way she was singing. The sheer power of it defied the reality of her health situation."
In between legs of a tour, Jones would go into the studio to make Soul of a Woman, where that vocal strength is audible in ways not heard on other artists' exit statements. Johnny Cash's magnificent third act concluded with two albums made while suffering from a nervous condition, asthma and diabetes. Warren Zevon recorded his final, Grammy-winning album after getting a terminal lung-cancer diagnosis. Both men sound understandably frail on those records. Downie, having just had two craniotomies, radiation and chemotherapy, doesn't sound frail on the recently released Introduce Yerself – far from it – but he is obviously emotionally vulnerable, writing love letters to family and friends.
With Jones, there is none of that. This is a woman who wanted to go out on top – like David Bowie with Blackstar, which came out 10 months before Jones died.
"She only came in to the studio when she felt strong," Roth says. "There was no reason for us to get her on tape when she felt weak or sick. That's not how she saw herself, or how we saw her."
That extended to the lyrical content as well. "It wasn't like we were trying to construct a goodbye letter," he says. "It wasn't a swan song, a final opus. It felt the same way all of our records felt: it's about being alive, about that moment. And cancer was part of that moment."
All 10 of the Dap-Kings were by Jones's bedside during her final days. "She suffered a few strokes," Roth says. "She couldn't speak, couldn't say hello or her name or follow simple commands." At one point, bandmate Binky Griptite started playing guitar and Jones started moaning and eventually singing. Everyone joined in.
"Day by day, even though her body was deteriorating, something in her brought back her voice and she was singing with us," Roth says. "She was forming words and we were singing these gospel tunes: Go Tell It On the Mountain, His Eye is on the Sparrow. She was singing beautifully, even harmonizing and improvising – all these things that you would think requires some amount of brain function, she was all there at that point. She couldn't answer a single question, but for days all she wanted to do, all day and all night, was sing to her last dying breath. It was so essential to who she was."
The album concludes with Call on God, a gospel song left off a 2007 album. She had written it "in the late seventies or early eighties," says Roth, for the church choir she led in Brooklyn. At the memorial service for her at that same church, former choir members flew in from across the United States. After the service, Jones's younger musical brothers in the Dap-Kings convinced her older gospel sisters in song to swing by Daptone Studios – where Jones herself installed the electrical wiring – overdubbing the choir on top of the old track.
"They got to sing with Sharon one more time, with her in their headphones," Roth says. "It was a beautiful way to complete the album, with something very personal, with something that connected with something she'd done her whole life, that connected the Dap-Tones with the church people to honour her together."
Now that she's gone, Jones's Dap-Kings are plotting their next move. They backed up Smokey Robinson on a coming Christmas album. But, unlike Prince's Revolution, they're not going to hit the road on their own.
"It's not even a question of taste or the optics of it, because I don't care about that, really," Roth says. "On one level, here's a great band that spent 20 years cultivating a sound, who loves being together and playing together – we're musicians and that's what we want to do. That's not an easy thing to say goodbye to. But the other side of that is the special connection we had with Sharon, and we know that there's no sense in chasing that high. We were never higher than when we were behind Sharon on stage."
Michael Barclay is the author of The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, due in April, 2018.