If you want to pick someone to elevate from obscurity to stardom, good luck finding a better story than Sharon Jones. A gospel-hewn powerhouse of a singer who’d been trying to break into the business since the ’70s, Jones spent her middle-aged years working as a Rikers correction officer because she kept getting written off by the industry — most notoriously, by a Sony exec who saw her as “too fat, too black, too short, and too old” to make it big in an MTV world. But somehow, talent won out: a mid ’90s session with fellow undersung veteran Lee Fields eventually led to this debut on big-things-to-come indie Daptone, featuring Brooklyn’s next-best thing to the J.B.’s backing Jones on stunning originals (blazing “Got a Thing on My Mind”; steamy “Make It Good to Me”) and the best “what if Janet and Jam/Lewis did their thing in ’66” cover of “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” conceivable.

– Nate Patrin