Marcia Ball

 By Alex Teitz

Marcia Ball is one of those rare artists who has done most everything over time. She has played folk, country , and most recently blues. Growing up in Vinton, Louisiana Ball has met and experienced a range a musical styles. Ball, with seven CDs to her name, is a prolific and active artist. Ball’s most recent work is Sing It with Irma Thomas and Tracy Nelson (available on Rounder Records). FEMMUSIC was lucky to get ahold of Ball one morning. For more information visit marciaball.com

FEMMUSIC: What made you want to pursue music professionally?

MB: Opportunity I guess as much as anything. I had music lessons as a kid. I had musicians in my family. People who played piano for pleasure in the home all my life. My grandmother and my aunt. So there was always music around. But when I got to college I met another singer and we did folk music, and then I got a chance to try out for a band, and be in a band. Once I was in one band I just figured I’d just try to stay in bands. Even if that meant starting a band, and that’s what it meant.

FEMMUSIC: How do you feel your music has changed over time?

MB: Well over the whole course of my career I’ve gone through a variety of styles. Some changes brought on by who I played with. Who I aligned with. When I moved to Austin I was playing Rock and Roll and this was in the early Seventies and that’s what we were all playing. That’s what everybody plays when they’re twenty. I met a group of country musicians, or a group of hippies who were playing country music. That was at a time when this was the coming thing. We didn’t even really  know how strongly it was coming at the time. We just knew that it was something different and we liked it. We played country music for a while and then when that band broke up and for several years I had my own bands and we just kind of played a mixture of music. Then in 1980 I decided that I was going to pursue rhythm and blues, and blues. Which is what I grew up with, and what I know best. What I have found the best platform for my instrument.

FEMMUSIC: Do you find that one style calls to you more than another?

MB: I would say blues and soul music. Pretty wide band of styles. Not just one kind of blues. Everything from Chicago Blues to Memphis Soul to New Orleans R & B.

FEMMUSIC: How do you come up with your songs? What is your songwriting process?

MB: I get down to the nitty gritty. I don’t know. I always have an ear out for a turn of a phrase. I’m always jotting down little notes about what could be a song. Then I sit down at the piano, less often than I should, and try craft them into actual songs not just notes on the backs of envelopes and receipts.

FEMMUSIC: How long does it usually take you to write a song?

MB: Oh gosh. Anywhere from forty-five minutes to five years. I go back…like yesterday was sitting at the piano and I started playing a progression of chords and then I had to spend about twenty minutes digging around to the find the scrap of paper I had written the notes on that, the lyrics on that I thought might go with that. Sometimes I go back and dig into old notebooks and find unfinished lyrics and cobble them together with a melody.

FEMMUSIC: Your last CD was Sing It and you were working with Irma Thomas & Tracy Nelson. How was it working with them, and are there any other artists you’re looking forward to working with?

MB: Well it was wonderful working with Irma and Tracy. Irma is a singer who has influenced me way before I was musician. As a teenager I saw her play in New Orleans, and always used her as a guiding light. Covered her material when I first started singing R&B, and still cover Irma songs.

Tracy Nelson was also like that with me. She’s closer to my age and experience, and she came up listening to Irma but she was a successful recording artist when I was just starting to play in bands at all. To me it was a dream come true get to work with these two women. And we had a wonderful time. We had a blast. We got along, and made a good record. I’m real proud of that work.

Looking forward to…oh gosh…I would work with a lot of people. I’d work with Bonnie Raitt and Etta James. You know I admire so many of the women…Carla Thomason, Ann Peebles, and I have a whole long list of admired women that I would work with. Dr. John produced one record I worked on, but I’d like to have his influence more in my music. He’s really the road to book on a lot of the style of music that  I play, or at least is interpreting it for the modern times. He’d be a good one. That’s just a few…of the many.

FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you faced discrimination?

MB: Well I have found maybe as much opportunity as I have found negative discrimination in my personal experience. I’ve never really felt that my degree of success was, or lack of that, was based on a gender issue in my personal experience. I think my willingness to work, and my opportunities and a lot of the decisions I’ve made had affected my position in the business. I think there’s so much luck and so many odd quirks of fate and tastes involved in who succeeds in the music industry that gender is just one factor. It can be overcome. I’ve found very little kind of sexual tension, or pressure that you might get going to paid at the end of the night and having to smile just a little bit too much or deflect a little bit of unwanted attention. There have been times but the rest of it, it terms of trying to craft a career I tend to think that if I’m ambitious enough and work hard enough as the next fellow then I will be as successful as the next fellow or person of either gender. Sometimes I think it’s to my advantage to be the woman playing the piano because it’s a little bit unusual.

FEMMUSIC: What one thing would you like to see changed about the music industry?

MB: What has evolved…a practice that has evolved and I think it’s more common than it used to be. It was always in place. The “one hit wonder” mentality. Kind of using up an artist and passing right over them I think has gotten more extreme now. I don’t care how big your success is. There are very artists who can, nowadays,  stand up to the steamroller that passes over them. That builds them up, and then just drops ’em. I think even people like Sheryl Crow and bands like Hansen are subjected to the same kind of “flavor of the month” mentality. And it’s driven by the industry that wants something brand new all the time. I’m not sure how much to the public taste that is, but it’s a shame. It’s unfortunate that young artists can have one opportunity to do their work and then pretty much be over the hill. 

FEMMUSIC: What advice would you give to an emerging artist?

MB: (Thinking) I think it’s maybe to understand what I just said about the fleeting nature of the big time, and to do your best work, and if music is going to be your lifelong pursuit then you might derive pleasure from the whole process. If stardom is your goal then you might find yourself with only fleeting joy. I think you can play music your whole life, as I have, and have many of my friends have, but not many of us have achieved what people would consider stardom. I have very few regrets about that. The more money, the classier travel arrangements (laughter)  would be welcome, but in terms of having had the opportunity to play music all my life, I couldn’t have asked for anything better.

FEMMUSIC: “Les Blues De Bosco” had you singing in Cajun French. How did prepare for that?

MB: Well I went to visit a Cajun, legend actually, in his own right. A man named Joe Bonsall in my hometown of Vinton, Louisiana who had a band for many, many years. He passed away a couple years ago now. He’d been ill when I was there. He ran a band in that part of the country for many years called The Orange Playboys. I went over to his house. Mom and I went over to visit him and I asked to help me with the words of that song so I could get them right, and he did.  Mama speaks French and I’ve heard French all my life and I have a pretty good accent when I learn the words and so we listened and we talked to him, and he taught me how it went. Pretty much learned it by heart.  (Pause) Kind of the way the Japanese learn Bluegrass.

FEMMUSIC: What are your plans for the new millennium?

MB: More of the same. More and better and hopefully the opportunity to create more music, and play for more people. Just to continue to pursue what I do which is what I love to do. More of it. I’d like to make a couple of really great records in the next few years.