Maybe revenge is a dish best served hot and sweaty. Somewhere out there in the elephant’s graveyard we call the music industry is an A&R guy who tried to euthanize Sharon Jones’s singing career before it even got started. “This is around the time of that Milli Vanilli stuff,” the vocalist tells the Straight from her home in New York. “And he told me that I didn’t have a look, that I needed to go bleach my skin, he told me I was too fat. He said, ‘You need to stop telling your age, you’re too old.’ That happened and it sorta hurt, knowing that I had a gift that God had given me.”

Only sorta? Let’s hope that he’s kicking himself bloody these days while auctioning off those dwindling Black Box gold discs to cover the rent. Talk about shooting your future in the foot. Not too long after that, Sharon Jones hooked up with a small independent label and its wax-obsessed house band and kick-started a sizzling and righteous soul revolution. But you’ve surely heard of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings by now. If not, it’s probably because you hate music. “I knew this was something that was gonna connect and I knew we could make it,” Jones says, of meeting Dap-Kings bandleader and Daptone label head Gabe Roth (aka Bosco Mann) in 1996. “I always told people, one day people are gonna accept me for my voice, not the way I look. When we first came to Europe and we opened up for Maceo Parker, and that Big Daddy magazine over there in London gave me that title, ‘Queen of Funk’, that was it. And we made no money, but I got a title for myself! And for the next 10 years I worked my butt off and now we’re finally getting recognized.”

Jones and the Dap-Kings released three albums between 2002 and 2007, with each one staking ever more convincing territory between ’60s soul and ’70s funk. But the band’s newest release, I Learned the Hard Way, is easily its best yet, beautifully synthesizing a host of historic and regional influences into something as vital as it is timeless, from the delirious Philly sound of the album opener, “The Game Gets Old”, to a title track that puts a harder, accusatory edge on Maxine Brown’s “Oh No Not My Baby”. The Dap-Kings then smoke on through Memphis, Detroit, and Muscle Shoals across the album’s remaining 10 tracks. As many have noted, at this point the band sounds far too lived-in to be merely retro. Naturally, Jones has her own take on that question, which she virtually sings down the line at me. “I say there’s nothing retro here,” she booms. “Retro is some young person trying to do something that the older people did back when. I’m 54 years old. I’m not trying to imitate anyone. I open my mouth and this is what comes out.”

Georgia Straight, June 2010