(AllHipHop News) Late soul star Sharon Jones suffered a stroke while watching Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential victory, according to her bandmate.
The leader of the Dap-Kings passed away aged 60 last Friday (November 18) after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Dap-Kings member Gabriel Roth, also known as Bosco Mann, said that the singer’s health worsened irrevocably after she suffered a stroke while watching the U.S. presidential election earlier this month.
And Gabriel added that Sharon blamed the stress of watching controversial billionaire Donald Trump emerge as America’s 45th president for her stroke.
“Well, she’d been fighting cancer for a few years now, and there’s been all kinds of stuff coming at her,” he said. “But the thing that actually got her in the last couple of weeks was, she had a stroke watching the election results. After that first stroke she couldn’t move her leg, but she could still talk.
“I flew out and met her up in the hospital in Cooperstown, and I saw her and she told the people that were there that Trump gave her the stroke. She was blaming Trump for the whole thing.”
On November 9, the day after the vote, Sharon suffered another stroke which left her unable to speak.
However Gabriel revealed that during her final days she was able to hum along to songs with her bandmates, all of whom visited her before she passed away.
“We all just kept playing and singing with her, and little by little over the next couple of days she actually started moving her mouth and started singing lyrics,” he said. “She just wanted to sing these gospel songs. Every time we’d stop, she’d just keep singing ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’ and ‘This Little Light of Mine’. We just stayed with her and sang with her and played music with her.”
In a moving tribute to the frontwoman, the bass guitarist added, “I mean, she was the strongest person any of us had ever known, and she just kept singing. She didn’t want to stop singing.”
