Photo by Edwin Cardona

But skill wasn’t the point. Participation was, and nobody encouraged it more than Jones, a vocal powerhouse and onetime session singer who is suddenly hot at age 51.

Jones’ eight-piece band, the Dap Kings, backed Brit-soul sensation Amy Winehouse in the studio. The relentless attention on Winehouse’s music and personal life fanned interest in the band and its other, full-time singer.

Thankfully, no one on Thursday requested any Amy Winehouse. Jones and the Dap Kings played songs from their three albums in what the big-voiced frontwoman called “our first gig of the new year,” a dry-land show before an engagement at sea with several other acts aboard the Jam Cruise (organized by Mark Brown, co-promoter of South Florida’s Langerado festival).

The Culture Room crowd included Jam Cruise patrons previewing their shipboard entertainment. What they got was an old-fashioned soul revue. The Dap Kings — eight men in jackets and ties — played a rambling overture, with a guitarist and emcee named Binky Griptite introducing the “super-bad soul sister … with the magnetic je ne sais quoi.”

Jones emerged in a sleeveless, thigh-high white dress and opened with the James Brown-styling I’m Not Gonna Cry. While Griptite played clipped chords, the roving Dap horns floated up and around Jones’ survivor refrain. The breakup chronicles continued — with help, so to speak, from the first of several would-be dancers — on How Do I Let a Good Man Down. For Nobody’s Baby, Jones had the whole room chip in the song’s “woo-hoo” response.

Let Them Knock was a case of lover’s bliss, laced with urgency — Jones in the role of someone clinging to a good thing knowing it might not last.

The Jones catalogue of love’s peaks and valleys can’t be regarded as a revelation; torchy singers such as Etta James and Koko Taylor long ago established the model of the strong-hearted soul and blues belter. South Florida’s own Betty Padgett is another great exponent of the style. But Jones’ earthy testimonies, delivered with exclamation points and underlined by the superb Dap Kings, are a welcome reintroduction to the form. Jones, who's been singing for decades, can hardly be called a nostalgia act.

100 Days, 100 Nights, the show's high point, compressed a whole funk-soul era into a single track, pivoting at the halfway mark from midtempo to waltz — an instance where the thrill came not from speeding up but slowing down.

When she encored with the funky Pick It Up, Lay It in The Cut, a handful of spectators came on stage to add their own period reference: breakdancing, which they did with goofy abandon to the great amusement of Jones.