Sharon Jones, where have you been all of these years? As it turns out, she and her Dap-Kings have been in the 1960s, and remain there to this day, churning out raw, gritty soul and R&B, as Ike & Tina Turner and James Brown once did.
It wasn't her fault that we didn't notice. "In the '70s, I was too short, too dark, too this, too that," she says. "Things were changing. Hip-hop was coming out. People didn't want the sound of horns and drums. They started in with the synthesizers."
But Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, who play Saturday at Water Street Music Hall, have never been anything but themselves. So real, they could take Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" and turn it into an R&B workout. Yes, they have done that — their version puts the edge back on what Guthrie never intended to be a sing-along for sixth-graders, but a protest song for workers.
Once forgotten, now everyone wants a piece of that real Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings retro sound. Michael Buble went to Daptone Studios in Brooklyn for a little of that magic, emerging with a duet with Jones on Dinah Washington's "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)." He was following the lead of the substance-abuse circus that is Amy Winehouse, who came to Daptone's vintage reel-to-reel machines to record her breakthrough album, Back to Black, with the Dap-Kings backing her. The worldwide search for roots authenticity even landed Jones a bit role, as a soul singer, in the Denzel Washington movie The Great Debaters, produced by Oprah Winfrey.
Most recently, on Halloween night, Jones and some of the Dap-Kings joined Phish in playing, from cover to cover, Exile on Main Street at a festival in Indio, Calif. "I'd never even heard of it," Jones says of the Rolling Stones' classic album. "Now I've got new fans who'd never heard of me," she says.
She thinks of herself as simply a voice in a larger sound. "In 14 years, we've never varied from that," Jones says. "That's why people like Amy Winehouse have been coming to us, because they want that sound."
Jones' story is a familiar one for soul singers, rooted in the gospel churches of Georgia. It started when she was 3. "I played a little angel, wings, a halo, and I got to sing 'Silent Night'" she says. "And everybody said, 'Ooooooh, the little girl can sing!'"
She moved to Brooklyn with her family, and as a teenager sang in bands, but couldn't graduate to the sound and look of the '70s. She was no disco diva. "Once they told me I didn't have the look, I focused more on the church and the choir." And prison. She famously worked as a corrections officer, for two years at Rikers Island.
But by late '90s, things were finally starting to percolate. People had seen her singing in an Italian wedding band, of all things. She was doing studio sessions with guys who wanted to put out vintage-looking and -sounding vinyl 45 rpm records, often singing backup on recordings by old Chitlin' Circuit crooners. And she started working with the Dap-Kings.
European fans jumped aboard, even before the Winehouse connection. As with jazz, our soul and R&B roots seem better appreciated elsewhere. "They never left it in the '70s," Jones says. "Look how Tina got so comfortable over there. They just appreciate all different kinds of music and cultures. What we're so uptight about here, over there, they're not uptight about. Everyone's so hung up on the race thing here. Or on how your rules are the only laws that should be."
Talking by phone from her apartment in New York City, the race question lingers in the interview air. She's 51, and seen plenty. "It seems like a black president would make the country better," Jones says. "Those people who want him to do bad, you're hurting your country. What happened to red, white and blue?
"That race thing, it makes me embarrassed to be an American." Jones pauses, aware of how this sounds. During the last election, Michelle Obama had said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" after her husband's early success in the Democratic primaries for president. She took some heat, but we know what she meant, and it was honest. Jones has had the same fight: Why does it matter if you're too dark, too short, or your music has horns when everyone else is using synthesizers?
Gospel and the church keep intact her soul — both her spirit and her music. And sometimes now, a freshwater lake does as well. "Fishing, that's my relaxation," Jones says. She dreams of some day having the time to camp out in the woods, maybe on an Indian reservation, "live on the earth for a while.
"This is the only country I have," Jones says. "I love it."
