Dap-Kings Who?

Back to Black is 20 today. The band on it belonged to a 50-year-old former Rikers Island officer, and the tour left her without them.

Amy Winehouse's Back to Black came out in the UK twenty years ago today, October 27, 2006. Island put out the anniversary edition last Friday: the album, four unreleased demos, the B-sides, and the whole show she played at the Paradiso in Amsterdam on February 8, 2007. It has sold something like 20 million copies. At the 2008 Grammys "Rehab" took Record and Song of the Year, she took Best New Artist, and Mark Ronson took Producer of the Year.

Put "Rehab" on again and listen to everybody who isn't her. That's the Dap-Kings, and they weren't hired hands. They were Sharon Jones's band, the house band at Daptone, the soul label Gabriel Roth and Neal Sugarman started in 2001 out of a run-down two-family house on Troutman Street in Bushwick: studio on the ground floor, offices upstairs, tape machines, no Pro Tools (Daptone). Ronson brought Winehouse there in 2006 and cut most of his songs with them, the band in one room and the drums on a single microphone.

Sharon Jones was 50 that year. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1956, she had worked as a corrections officer at Rikers Island and as an armored-car guard for Wells Fargo, and made her first record at 40, after label executives had decided, as she put it, that she was "too short, too fat, too black and too old."

Then Winehouse took the Dap-Kings on the road, and by December 2007 the Philadelphia Inquirer was reporting that the tour had left Jones "temporarily bandless." She was gracious about it. "People are like, 'Dap-Kings who?'" she said. "They can't mention Amy Winehouse without mentioning me, so that's a good thing." In February 2009, a year after the Grammys, somebody broke into the house on Troutman Street and took most of the equipment.

Winehouse died in 2011. Jones got her first Grammy nomination in 2014, for a record with her own name on the front, and died in November 2016. She was 60.