Ball like roots-music idols she admired

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music critic
• Published: May 2, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05am

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This weekend will be the 30th anniversary of Marcia Ball’s debut at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. With only two exceptions, the Austin-dwelling former Louisianan appeared at the festival every year since 1978.

Ball’s Jazz Fest gigs are among the slew of dates she performs every spring in south Louisiana. Her 2008 appearances include last weekend’s revival of the Baton Rouge Blues Festival.

“It’s our favorite place and our favorite time,” she said a few weeks ago from the road in Massachusetts.

When Ball made her Jazz Fest debut in 1978, many legends of New Orleans music, who’ve since passed on or stopped performing, walked the festival grounds. The classic artists on the festival’s schedule during the ’70s and early ’80s deeply influenced the musicians who followed them, including Ball, who’s since become an essential roots-music artist herself.

“It was pretty much amazing, but I was young and in the moment, probably not as hip to what was going on as I should have been,” the singer-pianist said. “I did see Professor Longhair out there, which was great. James Booker and Huey Smith were playing, Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey. That was all still happening. Of course, we knew who we were watching. We were big fans.”

As Ball recalls it, Jazz Fest stages were a mere three or four feet high then.

“It wasn’t these mega-stages like they have now,” she said. “I could walk right up to the barricade.”

Besides playing Jazz Fest through the years, Ball also performed at the Baton Rouge Blues Festival before it was discontinued in 1995. She’s got a deep appreciation for Red Stick’s homegrown blues.

“Baton Rouge has a great legacy of music,” she said. “It also seems like the Baton Rouge scene, especially because of the resurgence of activity by the Baton Rouge Blues Society, is really putting a spotlight on not just the past but the present and the future. Tabby Thomas and Raful Neal and all their kids, it’s this incredible scene in Baton Rouge and always has been.”

Ball was once part of the Baton Rouge music scene. A native of Texas who grew up in Vinton, she moved to Baton Rouge in 1966 to attend LSU. But school didn’t hold her interest. A piano player since childhood, she joined a local band and started singing for the first time.

Ball’s car expired in Austin, Texas, while she was on the way to San Francisco in 1970. She liked Austin’s free-thinking, tolerant spirit and decided to stay.

“We left Baton Rouge and thought we were going to San Francisco,” she said. “But Austin had everything San Francisco had to offer plus it had a Southern vibe, the feeling of being at home.

“Peace, Love & BBQ,” the title song for Ball’s first studio CD since 2003’s Grammy-nominated So Many Rivers, sounds very Austin.
 
“Austin is about all of those things, that’s for sure,” she said. “It’s a cute title, but it was also important for me to put ‘Peace’ in big letters on the front of my record.”