As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Monday, November 21, 2016

Sharon Jones


 
By the time I got to the theater Saturday afternoon, I was pretty sure there was going to be bad news.
 
I was driving up to Germantown to meet some friends for a showing of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, listening to The Gamut on the radio. (Wonderful station – check it out on the Internet, or on 820 AM Frederick, 98.3 FM Reston, or 103.5 HD3 Washington if you’re lucky enough to be within listening range.) I was initially delighted to hear “100 Days, 100 Nights” by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. The next song (which I didn’t recognize) also sounded like them, but I decided it was probably someone else, as even such eclectic stations as The Gamut rarely play two or more songs in a row by the same performer. That was followed, however, by Jones’s unmistakable cover version of “This Land Is Your Land”.
 
Bad sign – when stations that actually care about music do something like that (The Gamut actually played 6 Jones songs in a row), it generally means “tribute”, and I did know that she’d had a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer that had previously been in remission. Sure enough, after I arrived at the theater and finished typing her name into the Google search box on my phone, the dreaded “Trending” label appeared.
 
Although Jones left a legacy of several fine albums, her dynamic retro-soul persona was most compelling when experienced live. I was lucky enough to have seen her at the Lincoln Theater in February of 2014, one of the first shows I saw after my retirement the previous month. She joins an almost unbelievably long list of famous figures, musical and otherwise, that we’ve lost in the past week and a half – Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, Robert Vaughan, Gwen Ifill, Mose Allison. (Apologies to any I missed.)
 
Favorite songs:
I Learned The Hard Way
This Land Is Your Land
Without A Heart
Stranger To My Happiness

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