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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