We had no idea that it was going to turn out to be what it was,” says Neal Sugarman, the saxophonist with the Dap Kings, the Brooklyn-based funk band that backed Amy Winehouse on her Back to Black album. “We had no idea who she was beforehand. And even when the record was hitting in the UK, it wasn’t even a reality for us. We weren’t really sure that it was going to work. Hey, I run a record label, I probably should have sniffed that out, but I was pessimistic about it working – just her look and who she was and the type of music.”

Despite Sugarman’s misgivings, the vintage soul/Brill Building sound conjured by the Dap Kings and the producer Mark Ronson helped to take songs like Rehab and Back to Black to the pop charts and made Winehouse a sensation. Although members of the Dap Kings had previously worked on other Ronson projects such as Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Robbie Williams’s Rudebox, the transatlantic success of Back to Black and the subsequent American tour generated attention for the group, which has, in various incarnations, toiled on the cultish retro-funk scene for almost a decade. But after serving as the house band for MTV’s Video Music Awards in September and selling out the legendary Apollo Theatre in their hometown, the Dap Kings move closer to the spotlight with their rather wonderful third album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, recorded with their singer, the truly amazing Sharon Jones.

Born in James Brown’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia, Jones is a diminutive 51-year-old fireball with an infectious charm and a gritty, bluesy, showstopping voice. On 100 Days, 100 Nights, she delivers classic Southern soul-style ballads with perfect restraint and economy and simply smokes the uptempo funk grooves. One critic has dubbed her “the female James Brown”.

Jones, however, struggled for years to get noticed. In the 1970s she was told by producers that she was “too old”, “too fat” or just “didn’t have the look”. Frustrated, she largely gave up on music in the 1980s, save singing in a wedding band, before her then fiancé introduced her in the mid1990s to a young kid from Brooklyn named Gabriel Roth, who was recreating the sounds of late 1960s/early 1970s funk in his basement for the Desco label that he ran with Philippe Lehman. “Gabe was looking for three back-up singers to do this thing with Lee Fields, who was Desco’s major singer,” Jones recalls. “I was like, ‘You need three girls? I can do three-part harmonies and you can pay me this amount of money and I can save you.’ So Gabe went for it. One day he said, ‘Sing something to this music.’ And that was it. He was the glove and I just fitted right in.”

With Desco, Jones and the label’s house band, the Soul Providers, released a series of vinyl singles so convincing that many thought they were vintage funk. This trickery was largely the result of Roth’s unswerving allegiance to analog equipment and old-fashioned methods. After Desco folded and the Soul Providers mutated into the Dap Kings, Roth built an all-analog studio, where all the group’s material is recorded.

After Winehouse’s success, Roth’s studio and methods have attracted a lot of attention. “From the outside what we do might look strange,” he says. “But when you grow up listening to good records, you want to make records. You don’t grow up saying, ‘I want to make MP3s’ or ‘I want to make CDs.’ ” Jones loves working with the band after years of disappointment: “I’m able to sing stuff that I grew up on – songs that sound like Otis Redding, Tina Turner, James Brown, and no one can look at me and make fun. No one’s saying behind my back before a show, ‘Who’s going to see her old ass?’ Who’s coming to see me? I’m getting ready to sell out the Apollo, that’s who’s coming to see my old ass.”

Jones was also involved with the recent touring production of Lou Reed’s Berlin album. At first she was shocked by the dark material. “When I heard the songs [sings in a doomy Lou Reed voice]: ‘Caroline says... This is the bed that she slit her wrists in that cold and dark night.’ I’m like ‘Ewww’. But once they put the concert together and brought the choir in, it was beautiful.

“When we got to Australia, Lou Reed gave me two verses of Sweet Jane to sing, and when I sang those two verses the audience screamed and Lou Reed’s eyes were watering. He looked at me and looked at the crowd and said, ‘This woman right here took me to the mountain top tonight.’ ” Coming from rock’s prince of darkness, that is rare praise.

100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone) is out on Monday

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