‘Miss Sharon Jones!’ Paints Moving Portrain Of Soul Singer’s Cancer Battle

Starting her recording career when most artists start to fade, the late-in-life success of singer Sharon Jones was one of those things that made people believe talent conquers all and, sometimes, the good guys actually win. However, rather than focus on her miraculous metamorphosis from prison guard to festival playing soul sensation, the documentary Miss Sharon Jones! chronicles her battle with cancer, which would ultimately take her life a year after the movie was released in 2015. Directed by Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, the film is currently available for streaming on Netflix.

Once told by a record executive that she was “Too fat, too black, too short and too old” for a career in music, Jones was almost 40 when she was discovered by Gabriel Roth A.K.A. Bosco Mann, founder of Daptone Records. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised just over the South Carolina border, her family later moved to Brooklyn’s rough and tumble Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The first of her family to attend college, she eventually become a corrections officer at New York City’s infamous Rikers Island jail; after that, a guard on an armored car for Wells Fargo bank.

When not at one of her hardscrabble day jobs, Jones sang in church, in wedding bands, and did session work. It was at a backing vocal session for old school soul & funk singer Lee Fields that she hooked up with Roth, who would soon launch the Daptone Records label, which placed a premium on retro soul and funk grooves and analog recording. Jones would become the label’s flagship artist, backed by The Dap-Kings, who famously also played on Amy Winehouse’s landmark Back To Black album. Jones’ impassioned vocals reflected her Gospel roots and dripped with the kind of blues you have to live in order to sing. Her ecstatic live performances, where she would invariably kick off her shoes to dance, packed concert halls and earned her a reputation as “The Female James Brown.”

“I feel my day is coming,” Jones says at the start of Miss Sharon Jones!, after a quick review of her personal history. Flash forward to late 2013, and the firecracker live performer is subdued as she a comes near the end of a course of chemotherapy to treat stage II pancreatic cancer, with which she was diagnosed the previous January. We watch Jones as she goes to have her head shaved, as the last of her braids falls out, a result of the radiation pumped into her body to kill the disease. It’s a heart-wrenching scene for anyone who has ever lived through the indignities the treatment inflicts on people. Jones tries to make the best of it, asking the man shaving her bald, “I have a pretty shaped head?” She may take it in stride and call it “another chapter,” but it’s clear the experience is shattering.

Jones recuperates in upstate New York at the home of friend and holistic healer Megan Holken. Holken is one of many people in Jones’ orbit who are clearly devoted to her, including her managers Alex Kadvan and Austen Holman, and the members of The Dap-Kings. The devotion is reciprocal, as Jones helped build Daptone’s recording studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn; she describes the collection of nebbishy younger men that make up the group “the only family I got.” Not only is Jones’ health a concern, so is the financial well-being of the band and label. “I’m responsible for everybody’s payroll,” she says at one point, weighted down with the burden.

As Jones’ chemo nears its end date, she visits her real family down south, and takes time to visit the James Brown exhibit at the Augusta Museum of History. They may love their native sons and daughters now, but Jones’ reflections of the everyday racism she grew up with in the South reminds you of the hurdles she’s already overcome in life. Thinking back on her musical career, she says her earliest goal was simply “to get my mother out of the projects.”

Beating cancer is a slow process, with many fits and starts, and Miss Sharon Jones! doesn’t sugar coat the experience. Even after completing chemotherapy, there’s a stomach cancer scare, and Jones clearly struggles building up the strength to perform a February 2014 show. Dap-Kings guitarist Binky Griptite says at one point “She needs the show. That’s the best therapy she can have,” and Jones seems to agree. “When we’re on that stage and that music is out there I have no worries in the world,” she says, “I don’t think about anything, any pain. Sure there’s death but people came to see us and the show must go on.”

While Jones’ February 6, 2014 performance at New York’s Beacon Theater is clearly a celebration of her determination, it’s not easy going. She’s full of nerves before the show, insecure about her appearance and baldness, worried she’ll forget the words, which she does, and concerned about her legs getting tired. While the show is ultimately a triumph, it takes every bit of physical and mental strength for her to get through it. And then, unbelievably, she goes on tour. A world tour at that.

The movie ends a year later, following another cancer scare that resulted in part of her liver being removed. While Jones is now resigned to the fact that, “cancer is in your body and it never leaves,” she still obviously finds her ultimate healing on the stage, performing a homecoming show in Augusta in February 2015, a month after her liver surgery. Now with about an inch of hair on her head, she dances like the Sharon Jones of old, kicking off her shoes and singing with undiminished vocal power.

Miss Sharon Jones! is an affecting portrait of a woman battling cancer, more than it is a musical documentary or profile piece. It is bravely unsentimental and avoids cheap clichés about the triumph of the will and all good things happen to those who deserve it. Jones fights her way to the end of the movie, and there is a victory, but it also takes a very real toll, and you’re never really certain she’s going to make it. Watching it is all the more powerful when you know that Jones’ cancer returned in late 2015. She suffered a stroke this past election night last, which she joked was the result of seeing Donald Trump win. Sharon Jones died at the age of 60 on November 18, 2016, in Cooperstown, New York, not far from Holken’s house, surrounded by the members of The Dap-Kings.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Watch 'Miss Sharon Jones!' on Netflix