Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

Merging powerful vocals with retro-soul style, Sharon Jones was an overnight success who was decades in the making, breaking through in the late ‘90s a good 20 years after she began singing professionally. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1956, Jones was influenced by James Brown, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin, cultivating her own voice in the church choir. By the early 1970s, she discovered disco after her family moved to Brooklyn, where she joined local funk bands and provided background vocals for a variety of artists. In 1996, after Jones had been working as a corrections officer, producers Gabriel Roth and Philippe Lehman recruited her to record singles like “Damn It’s Hot” and “Bump N Touch Part 1”, tracks that quickly found some popularity in the US. With Roth and Lehman leading her newly created backing band, The Dap-Kings, Jones released albums like Dap-Dippin' With ... Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings (2002), 100 Days, 100 Nights (2005) and Give the People What They Want (2014), refining their retro-funk sound with each effort. Sadly, Jones’ late-career renaissance came to a premature end when she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 60 in 2016.