The State of Marcia Ball’s Art Has No Bounds : Pop music: The singer-pianist brings her mix of Louisiana and Texas to Long Beach for the Cajun & Zydeco Festival.

Until now, the annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival has done a splendid job of transplanting a chunk of southwestern Louisiana to Long Beach, presenting that bayou-riddled, French-speaking area’s traditional accordion-based Cajun music and its R&B; cousin, zydeco.

For the ninth annual fest, Saturday and Sunday at the port town’s Rainbow Lagoon, promoter Franklin Zawacki is broadening the borders a bit. On a bill that also includes mainstays Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Geno Delafose (son of the late accordionist John Delafose) & French Rockin’ Boogie and others, he has added Beau Jocque & the Zydeco Hi-Rollers and pianist-singer-songwriter Marcia Ball.

Beau Jocque comes from the same region and tradition but expands on that tradition with a harder-driving sound and a broader range of R&B; influences, including a signature tune derived from War’s “Low Rider.”

Ball is a longtime staple of the Austin, Tex., music scene, playing with nary a squeeze box or rubboard in sight. While she’s not a product of Cajun tradition, neither is she flying the Lone Star flag.

“That’s not what I represent in this show at all,” Ball said by phone last week from her south Austin home. “I’m not representing the western end of the musical map here, but the eastern end, the New Orleans end.”

As Ball’s version of Joe Ely’s “Fingernails” on her current “Blue House” album demonstrates, she can nail a Texas honky-tonk tune with the best of them. Her musical heart, though, is in the Crescent City.

It is there that such influences as soul singer Irma Thomas and piano genius Professor Longhair hailed from, and it is there that Ball is accepted as one of the city’s own. She’s a perennial favorite at the Jazz and Heritage Festival and other events. As jazz fest producer Quint Davis maintains, Ball has dual citizenship.

“I pretty well do. I was born right on the border in one state [in Orange, Tex.] and raised in the other [in Vinton, La.], and I can legitimately claim both and take advantage of it,” she said with a laugh.

In addition to the Long Beach dates, Balls is spending “five weeks and change” touring with Rounder Records label mates Riley and Beau Jocque. “Blue House” is her fourth album on the label, and a rollickingly masterful thing it is. Along with her always soulful vocals and hard-pumping piano work, it’s the first time Ball has penned most of an album’s songs. The results are both feet-compelling and hauntingly memorable.

At 44, Ball could probably be bitter about still being a radio-shunned club act after working two decades in music. But she’s too busy enjoying herself.

“I’m doing just fine,” she said. “It’s almost imperceptible, but there’s been a steady growth in my audience. Each record I make sells more than the one before. I’m just really well-suited for this business. I’m not frustrated by any of it. I love doing it. I like the travel. I like meeting people. I love the audience response.”

She says she’s coming into her best time to be devoted to music now that her three children are grown.

“About the time my son got his driver’s license and started ignoring me, I started feeling more free to go,” she said. “My husband [painter Gordon Fowler] has always been extremely understanding about the whole thing. He has been a musician, and he’s a painter, and he’s got quite a busy and active life of his own. I also think he understands there’s only a handful of things I would find emotionally devastating, and one of them would be if I couldn’t do this anymore.

“I’ve recently more than ever recognized the profound effect music has on people--a lot of times not the musician but the other party, the listener. There are people that music sustains, and when those people come up to you and say, ‘When I leave work I’m so miserable and frustrated, and then I put your tape on in the car and by the time I get home I feel good,’ that is so strong.

“I guess that’s why I do it, because you have such an effect on people. Also, I like the creative part of it. I want to be writing something, and writing songs is a lot faster than writing books.”

Two of the tracks on “Blue House”--”St. Gabriel” and “One of a Kind”--are examples of just how much can be conveyed in a song.

The first is a stark ballad, based on a true story, about a woman imprisoned for killing her abusive husband.

“A reporter friend of mine in Wichita, Kan., who knows this woman had us play at the prison up there, near Leavenworth,” she said. “When my friend met her, she had been in jail for 10 years and had been denied parole. So he wrote about her, and apparently the ensuing publicity and hearing the other side of the story made the difference, and she was paroled.

“We met her right before she got out of jail when we played the gig there. The song is her story, but I set it in St. Gabriel Prison in south Louisiana because it sounded so musical,” she said.

Ball’s song is far from being a rote anthem about injustice, instead centering on the vacuum the woman felt she was entering upon leaving prison after so many years:

Now they say I’m right and I’m free to go,

So I’m standing out here by the side of the road,

All the sad songs about leaving,

None about coming home,

Oh, I been down in St. Gabriel,

Nowhere to go. “One of a Kind”--a sad ballad about a love that should work but doesn’t--sounds like it was similarly drawn from someone’s hard experience. Its tone is so personal that it’s easy to assume that person is Ball.

Nope.

“I don’t wanna cheapen the effect of that song, but what I was actually doing was sitting at the piano one day and thinking about the way the Eagles write,” she said. “They’re great storytellers. ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ and ‘Hotel California’ are great songs, really novelettes. That’s what’s behind it.

“Stuff comes from just anywhere. This guy was telling me last night he was in Greece, and he was standing out at a ruins and he thought he heard someone saying, ‘Whadda you want? Whadda you need? Whadda you want? Whadda you need?’

“He thought he was hearing things,” she continued, “but he goes and finds this well in the ruins and on the wall barking down into it are these two frogs, and he’d mistaken their croaking for ‘Whadda you want? Whadda you need?’ And I thought, there’s a song. There’s the hook.”

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Ball always loved music growing up, and she considers it a turning point when she was 13 and first saw Irma Thomas. By the time Ball was in college in Baton Rouge, she was playing in a living-room band. In 1970 she determined to go to the West Coast to make it in music.

She got no farther than Austin.

Though many of its more promising lights--including Doug Sahm and Janis Joplin--had abandoned Austin for California in the few years previous, the young Ball and her friends found it ideal.

“Austin was a great place, and Eddie Wilson of the Armadillo [World Headquarters concert hall] was right: Austin was ‘cold beer and cheap pot.’ That’s why we moved here. That and a great liberal sensibility, a mind-set of relaxation and laid-back attitude spawned by the big university.

“We got a big house for $100 a month, had a friend who got us a no-pressure job at the university library. We went to the lake every weekend, lived about five blocks from Barton Springs. The creek that feeds it was completely undeveloped at that time, and you could just walk up there and swim naked.

“It was an idyllic existence,” she said. “Musically there was always something to do. The Armadillo was just opening up, or you could go to Threadgill’s little bar, and on Wednesday nights, Kenneth [Threadgill] would come out from behind the bar, wearing his apron, and sing the blue yodels like Jimmie Rodgers.”

Before long, Ball was fronting a country band called Freda & the Firedogs, and by 1978 had a country-rock solo album on Capitol Records titled “Circuit Queen.” By 1980, though, Ball was going full-tilt at the New Orleans-inspired R&B; style she’s become known for.

“By the time I did the album, I’d already gone much more into R&B.; So it was kind of a step back,” she said. “R&B; just seemed to be what I was writing. And I’d found that you have to pretty much be a cover band to be a country band in Texas. You can play your hits, if you have a hit, but otherwise you have to do radio music, and I wasn’t into that at all.

“I’d already discovered Professor Longhair and started to getting more into being a real piano player,” she said. “I’d discovered this body of work, and it all centered around R&B; and around Louisiana. It just was time to stake my claim and my territory.”

She sees her Austin home and New Orleans musical home as “as different as dust and mud. But there are similarities in that they both love music and are proud of their music, and they’re probably the only two cities in the South I’d want to live in.”

In her time in Austin, she’s become something of a respectable citizen, involved in many charities and issues, and she and her husband often allowed their restaurant, La Zona Rosa, to be used for benefits. She’s concerned by the growth of the city.

“Austin’s kinda like a doughnut,” she said. “Old Austin is the hole, and all that sprawl and high-tech stuff has become the meat of the doughnut. And I guess the hole of the doughnut is concerned with quality of life, and the meat of the doughnut is concerned with standard of living. It’s kind of a political fight to deal with those people. “They live in a suburb, and they work and they shop and they exist up in another town. It’s not our old town. People look down on the tendency of environmentalists--which has gotten to be a dirty word down here--to stand in the way of progress and growth,” she said.

“So we try and rationalize that, and we say, ‘We’re not anti-growth; we just want it to be done with sensitivity,’ to not mess up the few little natural resources we have here,” she said. “But, honestly, as I watch what goes on, I’ve gotta say that I don’t think there is anything so great about growth. I like a city where I can get across town in 15 minutes and to Antone’s [club] in nine,” she said.

Though the music scene in Austin remains healthy, competition and the desire to concentrate on other things prompted Ball and her husband recently to close La Zona Rosa.

“It was a good five-year run, but it was also wearing, though I already regret letting it go,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’m going to be out touring this summer, because I don’t have to be there to mourn it, to keep my car from automatically turning down that street.”

* The ninth annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival is Saturday and Sunday at Rainbow Lagoon, Shoreline Drive and Linden Avenue, Long Beach. Noon to 7 p.m. both days. Tickets are $20 (general), $15 (students and senior citizens), $5 (kids 10 to 16) and free for children under 10. (310) 427-3713 or (714) 638-1492.

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The Schedule

Gates open at 11 a.m. both days.

* Noon (Saturday): Brand-New Old-Time Cajun Band

* Noon (Sunday): Sheryl Cormier & Cajun Sounds

* 1 p.m.: Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie

* 2:15 p.m.: Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys

* 3:45 p.m.: Marcia Ball

* 5:15 p.m.: Beau Jocque & the Zydeco Hi-Rollers