Sharon Jones, the 54-years-strong soul chanteuse of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, has defied so many odds you'd think the band's latest album, I Learned the Hard Way, was about her. Jones swears it's not, though. The Dap Kings write her funk-filled songs. "She Ain't a Child No More," for instance, is about parents coming home, getting drunk, and beating their children. "My parents never did do that to me," the Georgia native says. "But they beat and abused themselves—that's why my mother separated from my father. He used to beat her. Maybe that's one of the reasons I haven't gotten married. I don't even have any children."
Jones is pretty much the most honest person you could hope to interview. She's openly talked about making it in the music industry the hard way. Before the New York Times dubbed her a "timeless soul singer" and Stephen Colbert called her "fierce," the raspy-voiced diva dropped her first album with the Dap Kings when she was in her forties. She tried breaking through in the music industry two decades earlier, she says. "But I didn't have the looks. This Sony guy told me I was too black, too fat, too short, and too old. Told me to go and bleach my skin. Told me to step in the background and just stay back." After getting turned down, Jones worked as a Rikers Island corrections officer, a Wells Fargo security guard, a sanitation officer, in postal offices, and as a wedding singer. "I was still doing the Wells Fargo thing when I met the Dap Kings," she says. For all those years, she knew she could really sing. "I just thought, "One day. One day." And that day came when I met those guys."
See more at: http://motherjones.com/mixed-media/2011/04/sharon-jones-interview-dap-kings
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