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Small Woman, Huge Voice | Sharon Jones (centre) had to wait three decades to achieve the musical stardom she deserved all along.

DETAILS

Edmonton Folk Music Festival
Gallagher Park
Thursday, August 6 - Sunday, August 9

More in: Live Music

SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS
Edmonton Folk Music Festival, Gallagher Park. Concert: Main Stage, Sat, Aug 8 (9pm)

This isn’t pleading, necessarily, but it is urgent and very heartfelt: if you’re at the Folk Festival this Saturday, please stay and watch Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

Don’t go home early. Don’t try and beat traffic. You don’t have to go to work the next day. If you leave before the last set of the night, you will miss one of the absolute best bands you’ve never heard of.

The Dap-Kings are a tight, fiery octet who play vintage funk, soul, and R&B so vibrant that it takes a minute to remember that exactly none of them were alive during the heyday of Stax or Motown. But each of the eight guys fully acts the part, right down to period-specific stage names (see: bassist Bosco Mann and guitarist Binky Griptite). You might recognize them as the band backing Amy Winehouse on all of the good songs on Back in Black.

And Sharon Jones? So glad you asked.

She’s a 53-year-old, 4’11” spitfire of a singer, who’s been honing her craft for nearly 40 years. Born in Georgia, Jones moved to New York City as a kid and quickly took up singing — first in church, then performing with neighbourhood funk groups as a teenager in the early ’70s. She soaked up vintage soul and R&B records from an early age, learning to imitate Michael Jackson and James Brown’s every vocal tic.

But success didn’t happen right away, even though she had the drive as well as the chops. According to representatives from the music industry, Jones had — to put it euphemistically — an image problem.

“They told me I was too dark-skinned,” Jones says bluntly, over the phone from her home in Queens. “They told me I should bleach my skin. They told me I was too black, too fat, too short, and then, once I passed 25, I was too old.”

Rather than pack it in, however, Jones only redoubled her efforts. For more than 20 years she worked as a session backup singer, picking up gigs wherever she could and taking a variety of day jobs to keep herself financially afloat. The jobs she went after in those years are in themselves telling, a sign of Jones’s strength of character as well as her utter fearlessness in bucking expectation after expectation, taboo after taboo. At one point, she applied to become a police officer, a sanitation worker, a court officer, and a corrections officer. Only the last of those came through, sending the 4’11” Jones to the adolescent ward of Rikers Island penitentiary.

“I mean, I had people jump at me, but I felt no fear,” she says of her time there. “That’s who I am. One inmate told me, ‘Ms. Jones, I like your watch.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ He said, ‘I want your watch.’ And I said, ‘You and how many other inmates are gonna take it?’ They thought they could knock me on the head and take it, but I just wasn’t gonna go out like that.”

In 1996, Jones was brought in to provide backing vocals to a session with Lee Fields for a small label called Desco Records. It was here that Jones met many of the musicians who would later wind up in the Dap-Kings, including a fresh-faced bassist and producer named Gabriel Roth. Looking back, she remembers their first meeting with a laugh — and maybe just a bit of condescension.

“Oh my God, [Gabe] was maybe 23, 24,” she says. “Homer [Steinweiss, drummer] was 16. I’m like, ‘What do these little white boys know about funk music?’... They were just printing 45s, these young guys. They wasn’t even serious about a record label. They just wanted to print some 45s, make some money, and fool people into thinking this stuff was done in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Desco folded soon after, and when Roth formed a new label, Daptone Records, Jones was one of the first people to join up. The label’s very first release was also Jones’s full-length debut, 2002’s Dap Dippin’ With Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. (In addition to running the label, Roth leads The Dap-Kings as its bassist and chief songwriter, where he goes by the handle Bosco Mann.) Since then, the group has released two more albums, each superb. Jones says a fourth is on the way.

In the meantime, they’ll be winning scores of new fans and delighting old ones in a blaze of horns and chicken scratch guitar this Saturday night. The least you could do is stick around and join them.