Marcia Ball: Rollicking at the keyboard

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Marcia Ball: Rollicking at the keyboard
September 3, 2009
By John Orr
Peninsula

Marcia Ball, who will bring her outrageous and delightful piano playing and singing to Yoshi's tonight and the Little Fox on Saturday night, grew up in Southeast Texas, steeped in soul music and rhythm and blues.

"It was the heyday of all that," she said recently by cell phone, as she was walking around Stein Mart in Austin with her mother. "I grew up with it, always played it.

"I grew when piano players ruled the world — Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ray Charles."

Ball grew up to be a great entertainer herself, a joy to watch as she folds her long, slim legs to sit at a piano bench and get that rollicking dance music going, or settles in for a moving slow ballad.

As her own career developed, she got the opportunity to meet Domino, and actually shared a stage with Lewis.

"I played music with Jerry Lee," she said. "But I don't know that you ever get to know him."

And while she will accept a compliment about her own shows, she points out "I don't push the piano across the stage with my belly," as Domino has been known to do.

At 60, loved and revered in the blues world, Ball has been piling up awards. At the 30th Blues Music Awards in Memphis on May 7, she took home her fourth Pinetop Perkins Piano Player Award in five years. At the Living Blues Awards in August, Ball was named Blues Artist of the Year (Female) and Most Outstanding Musician (Keyboard) in the Readers' Poll.

"I'm
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fortunate to be able to say I feel like I've had it all. I get to play music, have a career and also have a family," she said. "I am very grateful."

Ball has a son and three stepchildren, and a 10-year-old grandson. The family living around her in Austin these days now includes her 87-year-old mother, Hope.

"She's here in an apartment. She was eased her out of her home in Louisiana by her children, who are nervous. We couldn't go down there regularly, so we had to relocate her.

"We're spoiling her pretty much, so she'll realize she likes being with us."

While Ball talked over the phone with The Daily News, she was also talking with her mom about clothes at Stein Mart, which is "A chick thing," Ball said.

Marcia Ball herself is 6 feet tall and very slim.

"It's tough to find clothes," she said. "Well, not too tough, otherwise my closet wouldn't be cramola. But growing up I had a hard time finding pants, so I learned to sew. I still enjoy sewing."

Ball is out on the road about 150 days a year, playing around 125 gigs. She is thinking about starting work on a 12th album.

"I am due, I need to record," she said. "I've been kind of busy, enjoying touring, but "... I kind of write when I need to write. Sometimes a deadline helps.

"The biggest part of the question of writing new music is what are we going to do with it, because record companies are struggling, figuring out how to distribute. People are buying songs, not albums. Although, at our gigs, people buy albums."

Ball says she feels an obligation to play music for people.

"People count on music in their lives to see them through," she said.

"After Katrina, when we went to New Orleans, I was uncertain about it at that point. People were suffering.

"But those people danced all night, they danced their blues away."