‘TIL I COME HOME:
an interview with Sharon Jones

“I need a door. See, a door they would knock.”

All Sharon Jones wants are a couple of solid walls, a floor to walk on, maybe even a bathroom equipped with modern plumbing. A door for visitors to knock on. But she’s not getting these tonight as she waits in her tent outside the mainstage, periodically dipping into her track jacket for a cellphone that’s ringing off the hook. Instead she’s preparing for a headlining set at the Grassroots Festival of Culture and Art, and her dress is locked inside the van — the same van in which she and her knights, known collectively as the Dap Kings, drove into Ithaca this morning on their way down from the Ottawa Bluesfest. It’s been a long haul to end up without a toilet to call your own.

And yet her spirits are high, even miraculously so, as she invites three timid college students into her tent. She’s never met nor communicated with any of us before, but she immediately launches into a recount of the past 24 hrs, Sharon Jones-style: breaking into a rhythmic sway mid-sentence, shaking her arms for emphasis as if she’s here to rile the whole world into action. Thing is, the text messages and other sensory input clouding the scene are irrelevent to Jones’ continual creativity. She is an entertainer, and her conversation rarely deviates from that mission.

So she does entertain, even while lapsing into the deeply personal: her stint as a security officer at a bank in New York City, her early self-awareness of existing outside the conventional soul star’s body image, her stop-start career and the wedding gigs along the way. Into these narratives she injects signs of the here and now: a song her band has been demo-ing, a melody she recalls from years ago. She even produces visual evidence, brandishing a picture of herself posing with Denzel Washington, with whom she collaborated on the soundtrack to his 2007 film, The Great Debaters. Despite their comical gap in physical standing, it’s still Jones who dominates the image.

Of course, there is a concerted effort that goes into the Dap-King image. Jones reveals that her studio still works with analog tapes and other so-called archaic material to recreate her band’s vintage style. “I’m not a little hip-hopper,” she clarifies. “I don’t need them to bend my voice in tune. I don’t need that stuff.” She promises the new album, which should see release on the familiar Daptone records label sometime in the next year, will continue in the usual vein. Even so, the new songs she introduced in the night’s performance represented an expansion of that 70’s soul, toying with dramatic tempo changes and slightly more unusual structures than we’ve seen from the band’s previous three records. Jones also continues to take an active role in the songwriting process, using the raw material provided by her band as an entry into her own emotional readings of the songs.

The performance itself bears none of the strain of this collaborative process: the Dap-Kings, whose talent translates to rapt audience members even in Sharon’s absence, groove for a solid ten minutes before she comes onto stage. When she does, she’s already gyrating in the dress she managed to rescue from the van — just in time, too, because the crowd’s legs have started pounding the mud with a surprising fervor. The rest of the 90-minute set is a literal blur, as she alternately invites audience members to be her doo-wop background singers, tears her own invisible rug during an extended African jam session, and covers the Jackson Five’s “I Want You back” without any of the complacent solemnity of other recent Jackson tributes. The classic melody needs no translation, in fact, locating a devastating joy in the pure and unkempt sound of Jones’ voice. (view video: here)

When asked to explain how her music translates so well abroad, despite its specific American quality, that voice dips into a grabbing lower register. She’s become uncharacteristically hushed, commanding our attention, still hours away from the moment of performance. “For me, it’s that we’re staying true to our music: that era, that funk, that sound. We’ve been doing this now going on 14 years, and we haven’t changed…” She pauses, owning the last few words. “This is what we’re doing.”

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“Nobody’s Baby” one of the many songs Sharon and the Dap-Kings performed Friday at GrassRoots Festival

Michael Spreter