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Nov 01, 2017 By Christopher Roberts Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Modern soul legend Sharon Jones (of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings) died last year at age 60, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Now The Dap-Kings are releasing a final Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings album, Soul of a Woman, recorded in the months before she passed, on November 17 via Daptone. Previously they shared a new song, “Matter of Time,” via its video. Now they have shared another song from the album, “Call on God,” via its video, which features the band recording the song in the studio, with Jones on piano. Watch it below.

Jones wrote the song in the late 1970s for E.L. Fields’ Gospel Wonders, which is a choir at the Universal Church of God in New York City that Jones sang with throughout most of her life. This song was actually recorded in 2007 during sessions for the Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings album 100 Days, 100 Nights, but was saved for a gospel album they never got around to recording.

A press release describes the recording of “Call on God” as such: “Sharon played all the piano and sang her parts live with the band, providing very specific direction of exactly how she wanted the music to sound. Though she always provided input on all her songs, it wasn’t common for Sharon to take full charge of the arrangements like she did on these two gospel tracks.”

E.L. Fields’ widow, Pastor Margot Fields, presided over Jones’ memorial service. Several of the original members of the Gospel Wonders were there and performed a tribute to Jones. Afterwards The Dap-Kings approached them to come into the studio and help them finish “Call on God.” As the press release describes it: “At the studio, the members of the choir put on headphones and heard Sharon’s voice singing the song she wrote for them three decades earlier. Sharon always wanted to add background vocals to the song and she would have been happy to know that her old friends had come through to sing with her one final time.”

A previous press release described Soul of a Woman as such: “Though we’ll never again see her electric form shimmy across the stage, Sharon Jones continues to give us her soul and her music. She died nearly a year ago, but only now can we hear her final creation. Soul of a Woman captures a singer and a band at the peak of their power. Cutting one last time to eight-track tape at Daptone’s House of Soul studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the band endeavored to create a record that stretches the limits of their soulful sound in all directions, giving us both their rawest and most sophisticated recordings to date-a final statement by one of the most influential rhythm and blues voices of the 21st century.”

The Dap-Kings’ bass player Bosco Mann produced the album and had this to say about it in a previous press release: “The last couple of years, Sharon was battling. When she was strongest, that’s when we’d go into the studio-Sharon couldn’t phone it in, so we would only work when she was really feeling it.”

Soul of a Woman was initially intended to be an album of string-laden ballads, perhaps accompanied by a tour featuring symphonies or string sections, but as they realized Jones didn’t have a lot of time left, they also recorded some of the funkier music she loved. As Mann says: “Side one is the more raw live side, while side two is more moody and orchestrated-more of a departure from her carnivorous live persona.”

Mann also says that Soul of a Woman ended up being their most collaborative album: “Sharon wanted to hear the story and relate to the song on a personal level. We were all living together on the road, so if somebody was going through something, she was right there with us. She couldn’t really sing something unless she could really own it and sing it from her heart.”

We last interviewed Jones in 2016, just a few months before her passing, and you can read that article here. And here is the tribute we wrote to Jones when she passed.

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