Marcia Ball is an anomaly in the world of piano-based R&B/blues/boogie. A keyboardist who was steeped in and absorbed all the rich traditions of New Orleans, she makes her home in Austin, where she is a singer-songwriter who tickles the ivories rather than wielding an acoustic guitar. An emotive blues vocalist, Ball effectively uses her flexible, upper-register voice rather than trying to adapt her instrument to the gruffer low-end more prevalent in the genre.

Along with Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, Beau Jocque, and sometimes Geno Delafosse, Ball and her band were part of the "Louisiana Red Hot Music Tour," a month-long cross-country escapade mounted by Rounder Records as part of their 25th Anniversary celebration. On the last stop on the tour, Ball headlined one day of the annual American Music Festival at Fitzgerald's near Chicago. The Mardi Gras atmosphere at the club was anything but conducive to talking, so we spoke by phone a few days later, when Ball talked about her continuing love affairs with New Orleans and Austin, her band, Rounder Records, and the tour.

New Orleans seems to be very much a keyboard oriented town, with some of the greatest jazz and blues piano players in residence there. "I have a theory about how towns develop musically, that maybe there's a person who's a foundation. Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters in Chicago established a theme that inspired other great traditional blues guitarists and harmonica players. Therefore, to me, Chicago is kind of a guitar and harmonica town. New Orleans with its old horn tradition, starting with Buddy Bowlin and Louis Armstrong, is a strong horn town - brass and saxophone. Then the keyboards came up - there were great keyboard players to begin with, who were often included in Dixieland bands, but Professor Longhair is a foundation person as far as keyboard is concerned, and he invented a style that was carried on in the next two generations and is still going.

"So New Orleans is primarily a keyboard and horn town. There's (pianist) Ellis Marsalis and his horn-playing sons. Toots Washington, who was in his eighties when 'Fess was in his sixties, definitely had an influence on 'Fess, although he was much more traditional than 'Fess was."

Born just across the border in Texas, Ball was exposed to New Orleans music at a very early age. "Having found this wonderful piano world, it called to me," she said. "I think one of the reasons that it worked so well for me was that my background in keyboards had been so traditional and old fashioned anyway. My grandmother played, and was a ragtime era piano player, so I grew up with a lot of old sheet music in my ears, old piano songs and styles in my head. It was something that I already felt close to, to hear those New Orleans chord changes - they're not straight blues changes, they're not pop changes, they have a real old fashioned sense to them."

Ball was quick to point out that there is no narrow genre that can be defined as New Orleans music. "A lot of people forget that New Orleans is not just one thing. I'm not gonna go out there and just cover a bunch of Fats Domino tunes in order to fit into somebody's idea of what New Orleans music is supposed to be. It's a broad musical scene, and actually New Orleans has a lot more funk and jazz influence than is in what I do. When I get funky, people tend to characterize that as Memphis, and it is, to a certain extent. That river flows both ways - literally. In the bus, we had the 'Piano Players Who Rarely, If Ever, Play Together' video, with Allan Toussaint, Professor Longhair, and Toots Washington in it. At one point, Alan Toussaint is in the studio running through a list of the songs he's written, and the guys kept looking at me like 'That too? And That?' 'Workin' in a Coal Mine,' 'Holy Cow,' and so on. So it's broad, and peculiar sometimes."

Ball has lived in Austin since 1970, and some of that town's diverse musical pedigrees have rubbed off on her. "Maybe so, maybe in the song writing tendencies," she said. "I draw a lot of inspiration from Austin in terms of song writing, and energy. I don't fit into Austin - I'm not playing the part of the sensitive acoustic singer songwriter. I'm not singing about the West Texas wind the way the Lubbock guys do, but there is some great quality song writing going on in this town, and it's a challenge to reach for that. It's kind of an effort not to be distracted by that, because I don't want to get too far away from being a blues player.

"Austin also has a strong blues tradition. Again, it's guitar players, a fact of the matter is that those were Dallas guys. We've got great piano players, too - we've got a fun bunch of piano players. Riley Osborne, who's out with Doyle Bramhall now. Floyd Domino, from Asleep at the Wheel days and other projects since then. I just saw him on Don Walser's video. Gene Taylor's living here now, the guy from the Blasters who's now playing with Kim Wilson."

Ball has come up with some unique ways of spot-lighting her fellow Austin keyboard players. She does a show called Pianorama where she puts five pianos on stage and invites various friends to play. "It's cacophony, but God, do we have a good time," she said. "We have one drummer, my drummer usually. He calls it 'Pianorambo'."

Participants have included Domino; Nick Connally, a veteran of Delbert McClinton's band; Reese Wynans, who used to play with Stevie Ray Vaughn; Beto, from Beto and the Fairlanes; and Danny Levin from Asleep at the Wheel.

"We've also got great old piano players. I used to do something with the Texas Folklife Resources people where I was sort of an emcee, did a sort of demonstration of some ragtime and barrelhouse styles, then brought out Grey Ghost, who's 90, LaVada Durst, who's 80, and Herbie Bowser, who's 75, and they each came out and played their stuff. We had Robert Shaw, who is a nationally acclaimed barrelhouse player, here in the 70s. I missed Robert Shaw - in the late 70s I was doing a different thing; my son was young, and I didn't get out that much, so I didn't get to see him or know him, and I'm poorer for it.

"We've been lucky because, when Clifford Antone opened Antone's, he gave all an opportunity to meet and play with - get to know - our heroes. We got to back up people like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush, to get to know people like Pinetop (Perkins) and Sunnyland (Slim) and Albert Collins."

Ball's five piece band has been together for years, and remains one of the tightest performing units in the business, generating an on-stage enthusiasm for their craft that simply couldn't be faked. "The new guys are now in their fifth year, Steve Williams on guitar and Paul Klemperer on saxophone. It's been six years for the drummer, Rodney Craig, and my bass player (Don Bennett) - I think I got him before my husband, so it must be thirteen years. I think we work together really well, both musically and personally. It's really important, particularly in light of the amount of time we spend together. If there were tensions, it would be debilitating. I've actually known bands who could hardly stand one another off stage - in fact, I was in one - and when it was good, it was very, very good, but when it started to deteriorate, we would barely speak, and we'd get up on stage, and we all loved the music so much, that by the time we finished playing it was all wonderful again. Then during the week the tensions would build up."

In some cases, long package tours can be, at best, a mixed blessing, but Ball had nothing but good things to say about the Red Hot Louisiana Music jaunt. "I loved it. In a lot of cases, we filled halls that we wouldn't have been able to individually. We were able to play a lot of venues that I've wanted to play for a long time. I think we gave the audience their money's worth. It was fun for me to get to know the guys in the other two bands, and even the third band, when Beau Jocque was out for a week, and Geno Delafose came in and filled in for a week, I got the extra benefit of getting to know those guys. They were wonderful, a really up and coming talent.

"Musically, it was a great opportunity for people to see a great example of Cajun music and a fine example of zydeco music, and to be able to tell the difference. People always ask what the difference is, and that was the best way to find out. And we represented the New Orleans stylings (laughing). People got an opportunity to hear a real cross-section of Louisiana music."

Ball, and the audiences on the tour, were particularly impressed with zydeco wunderkind Delafose. "Geno started playing with his dad when he was nine. When we were doing a radio interview in Nashville or someplace - the DJ was reading his biography and it said that he had been in the music business for 15 years. I looked at Geno, and he's only 24. His dad was a great player, and he passed away last year on stage - as the guy in Grumpy Old Men said, 'Lucky bastard.' So Geno took it up and kept the band going."

Although she was done with the Rounder tour, Ball had only a couple of days' worth of down time in Austin before heading out on the road for the remainder of the summer. She was particularly excited about her first gig with an orchestra. She and her band were scheduled to play a selection of her songs with the Columbus Pops Orchestra in Lancaster Ohio.

Ball's last album, Blue House, came out in 1994, but a new recording is in planning stages. "I'm hoping to do it in the fall. This is such a busy season for us, and I don't write well on the road. I can write lyrics, but I don't write music well on the bus. On this last tour I had high hopes - I had a keyboard and my little computer, and I thought I'd get more work done, but instead we just sat up and watched movies on the VCR. It was a pretty intense schedule - get on the bus, get off the bus, eat, dress, play, get on the bus. I'll finish up the writing in the fall, record, and get it out."

Ball also has two projects in the works in different media. The first is an unusual, long-form video. "We took a video crew to Mardi Gras this year. We did use part of our video budget to make a regular clip of a song - you hope it gets on MTV or VH1 but it doesn't - but we took the little video crew to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. We ended up with a 30 minute walkin', talkin', eating, playing, going to parades, hangin' out at Mardi Gras with the Marcia Ball Band video that we're just going to sell as a product. There are four complete songs, there's music behind the whole thing. There's lots of eating, plenty of parading."

The second project involves the printed word. "Quite some time ago I started a combination souvenir book/song book. I'll probably do two volumes - 12 songs in one volume, 12 in the other - of original material, interspersed with photographs and other stuff. Kaz, my horn arranger, helped me put this together, so they'll be pretty simple piano arrangements. So I think that anyone who would like to pick our stuff would be able to."

One of the most popular projects that Ball has been involved with was the Dreams So Real album and tour that she undertook with fellow Austinites Angela Strehli and LouAnn Barton a few years back. Ball chuckled when asked about the likelihood of an encore project. "Those Girls? I don't know. Angela and I were out in San Francisco - we were booked together on the radio, on West Coast Live. She didn't know I was on, so she brought another piano player, but we ended up doing one song together with me playing piano. LouAnn is doing great, travelling on her own. You know, it took us five years to do the last one, we were all on the road, and so busy, and we're all a lot busier now. We have talked about it - we have certainly been urged by our fans, and Antones would love it if we were to do it. We'll see how it goes."

In closing, Ball talked about her long term relationship with Rounder Records. "I love it. I've been with them about half their 25 years. As you've been able to tell from other things I've said, I'm pretty sedentary - I don't make that many big moves - I stay in the same house and with the same band, but Rounder has grown so much from the days of three original partners and their skeleton crew and their little offices in Cambridge. They're a big company now with a big staff and lots of things that they distribute. Every kind of growth that they have in one area seems to enhance their growth in other areas. They have better distribution, more involved staff and promotion, and the success seems to follow them. Alison's [Krauss] record is a great example. We're all selling a lot of records - enough records that I think they're becoming a viable player in any sense of the word. Yet I can still call up and feel like I'm talking to a manageable entity. They also still have a lot of integrity creatively - they sign artists whose music they like, and they let them create that music. They don't try to manipulate their artists, and that's so important. The fear you have with majors sometimes is getting lost or mishandled, and I never felt that I couldn't say I need this, I want this or let's try this. In fact, this video that I'm doing - they've never tried anything like it. They've got their movie out (the 1994 documentary, True Believers), but they've never done anything like this 30-minute video product. They're excited - they get to do something new and figure out what to do with it."

Ball's parting words pointed out the dangers of her own visits to Rounder headquarters. "The Rounder warehouse is something between a dream and a nightmare for me. A musical dream and an economic nightmare."

Article by Michael Parrish
Photo courtesy Rounder Records

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