Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings Bring the Funk on a Soulful Bonnaroo Saturday

Soul shakedowns were all over the place at Bonnaroo on Saturday afternoon, as the drizzle gave way to sunshine. Over at This Tent, roots-rock duo The Wood Brothers jammed with keyboardist extraordinaire John Medeski; at the What stage, the Soul Rebels Brass Band turned out a set of pumped-up New Orleans soul, funk and jazz. Meanwhile, New York-based outfit Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings ripped up the Which Stage. They might not have been the most suavely-dressed of the three groups — former corrections officer Jones was decked out in a ruffled get-up she called her "Tina Turner dress," and her band sported stifling black suits — but they were by sure the funkiest. Over sexed-up riff-driven funk and retro-style big-band soul, Jones unleashed her firey pipes on tunes about broken and breaking hearts. The highlight? That one cut about a girl named Susie who turns tricks as Lucy and brings home a thousand dollars a night, which the group dedicated to "all the working girls out there."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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