The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #226

#226: "100 Days, 100 Nights" (2007) - Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Sharon Jones--born in Georgia, raised in New York--spent her Sundays singing gospel in the church, but listening to this song, we can guess how she spent her Saturday nights...and the toll they spent on her. It took Jones forty years before she began to sing professionally, but listening to this record, you can tell she's got enough experience in heartbreak to make up for all those years when she should have been putting her soul on record. Sounding like a world-weary Etta James, Sharon Jones offers a bit of apocryphl wisdom to other women regarding her own interpretation of how, as Stephen King said, a man's heart is stonier. Then, halfway through the record, Jones invokes the ghost of Elvis (who, after a few bars of slow blues in the Sun Studios' song "Milkcow Blues Boogie," told Scotty and Bill, "Hold it fellas!/That don't move./Let's get real, real gone for a change," and then quadrupled the time signature, thereby helping to create rock and roll) by stopping the song cold, telling her impeccable band The Dap-Kings to "Wait a minute!/ Baby, I need to slow it down a little./Take my time." Jones then transforms the record from a mid-tempo soul joint in 4/4 to a slow 12-bar blues, complete with haunting, gospel-like background vocals, all-the-while witnessing, going from soul to blues to gospel, changing from the general to the specific in order to make the message universal, and that's no easy task. The song's a cautionary tale not only to women, but also to men, who--if they listen closely--might see a sliver of themselves, enough to shame them--Jones's Marley to our Scrooge--into watching how they behave, lest their inamoratae give up the ghost.