Sharon Jones Tells Cancer 'Get up and Get Out'
by Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam
August 01, 2016
Note: This story originally aired and published on the July 29, 2016, episode of Dinner Party Download from American Public Media.
Sharon Jones is the unstoppable lead singer of the funk and soul band Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings The ten piece act has been releasing albums and touring the world for a decade. In 2014, they earned a Grammy nomination for Best R&B album.
The year before that album came out, Sharon was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A new documentary called Miss Sharon Jones follows her during that period. The film plays in select cities from now through September, before being released through Starz on-demand. Check out the trailer below:
Sharon and the Dap-Kings are currently on a world tour with Hall and Oates, but the cancer has returned. When Brendan met with Sharon, he asked how she was feeling about her career when she got her first diagnosis.
Interview
Sharon Jones: The next album is coming out, and you know, you’re looking forward to that. Because with us, we have to do shows to make music. There’s not like a bunch of royalties coming. It’s not like we selling millions and we got millions of dollars coming in.
Brendan Francis Newnam: You’re a touring band, yeah.
Sharon Jones: Yeah. We working hard to get what you have.
And I had just came back sort of off of a little vacation from Hawaii. While I was in Hawaii, I just kept saying “My eyes look yellow.” And I was itching, you know? And I come back home and go to my doctor. He looks at me, sends me to this oncologist doctor, set me up for MRI.
He seems a little uptight when we told him we was going to New York. So he says, “Well, you can go to” — this is how I found out I had cancer — he said, “Go to New York and get your fancy doctors,” or “your Yankee doctors” or something like that, “and they gonna tell you the same thing: You have cancer.”
I was like, “Cancer?”
Brendan Francis Newnam: He hadn’t even had told you his diagnosis yet.
Sharon Jones: Yeah. I don’t think he realized, to this day, that he probably did that.
Brendan Francis Newnam: And that’s kind of where this documentary begins. Before we get to that, your journey to becoming a touring musician, who is successful, who had a new album coming out. It had been a long one. You had been a corrections officer, you sang in wedding bands. A music executive once said, “You’re not worth investing in because you’re too big, too old, too black, too short…”
What made you keep trying to do music when you were well into your 30s and not…
Sharon Jones: My first album out when I was 40. I knew I was talented, I knew I had a gift just being in the church, and just realized what my mom said, “That guy was a knucklehead. You know you’re a beautiful black woman. And pretty soon people will accept you for your voice, not the way you look.”
Brendan Francis Newnam: There must have been such a big temptation though, because you were living with your mother in Queens, you were making ends meet. To not come home after work and go out singing… what motivated you to push harder?
Sharon Jones: I just knew that we had something, The Dap-Kings. Once Mark Ronson got involved and Amy like, “Oh, you know, the band comes, and we gonna do this thing for this British girl.”
Brendan Francis Newnam: When you guys sang, you guys worked with Amy Winehouse for “Back in Black.”
Sharon Jones: Soul singing British. You’re like, “What?!? All right.”
And the next thing you know, a couple of weeks later, it’s all in the newspaper, “The British Are Coming!” The next thing you know, Amy all on the show. The band played with her while she was in the states.
And I was like, we’ve been doing this for the last… Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson been listening to us over the last 10 years. They coming to us because that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. And so if they can hit on something, we got something here. And I was like, “This is the last job I’m gonna get… y’all. We gotta make this work.”
Brendan Francis Newnam: So you did make it work. The band has what, like 10, 11 members? It waxes and wanes a little bit.
Sharon Jones: Yeah, yeah.
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