Marcia Ball

Artist's Website

Marcia Ball grew up in the small Texas border town of Vinton, Louisiana, where she discovered the piano and the blues at an early age. By 1966, she was a student at Louisiana State University, where she played some of her very first gigs with a blues-based rock band called Gum. After graduating in 1970, Ball set out for San Francisco, but decided to stay put in Austin, Texas, after stopping in the city for car repairs along her way to California. Before long, Ball was performing in the city’s clubs with a progressive country band called Freda and the Firedogs, while beginning to hone her songwriting skills.

When the band broke up in 1974, Ball launched her solo career, signing to Capitol Records and debuting with the country-soul album Circuit Queen in 1978. She released six critically acclaimed Rounder albums during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1990, Ball recorded the hugely successful Dreams Come True on the Antone’s label and at the end of 1997, she finished work on a similar “three divas of the blues” project for Rounder. Soon after, Sing It! was released in 1998 and was nominated for both a Grammy® and a W.C. Handy Blues Award as Best Contemporary Blues Album. Ball also received the 1998 W.C. Handy Blues Award for Contemporary Female Vocalist of the Year (and was nominated again in 2000, 2001 and in 2002) for Best Blues Instrumentalist-Keyboards.

Ball’s debut release on Alligator Records, Presumed Innocent (2001), was in the Top 20 chart positions at Album Network, Gavin and FMQB and won the W.C. Handy Blues Award for “Best Blues Album of the Year.” Following its success, Ball’s latest offering is So Many Rivers (Alligator Records, 2003) featuring her trademark mix of raucous boogie and heart-melting ballads, but also exploring a wider variety of rhythms, lyrics and song structures than ever before.

Join etown for an encore performance from Marcia Ball, “a class act whose soulful, horn-laden swamp pop and murderous honky-tonk make her a stellar example of musical artistry.” Austin Chronicle