Hot Tamale Baby

This relentlessly upbeat album, Marcia Ball’s second for Rounder, marks her 1985 graduation from the Louisiana-Texas “crawfish circuit” to the national scene. But it still packs the freewheeling feel of her four-sets-a-night years. These 10 tunes dash through soul (“I’m Gonna Forget About You”), R&B (“Don’t You Know I Love You”), blues (“Another Man’s Woman”), rock & roll (Ball’s own “That’s Enough of That Stuff”), and zydeco (the Clifton Chenier-penned title track) with such gleeful abandon they seem to pass in a flash. All the while, Ball–who’s joined by her three-piece band and a visiting horn section–makes like a female Jerry Lee Lewis, pounding her piano with bare- knuckled virtuosity as she shouts and swoops through her good-time lyrics. Drummer Doyle Bramhall went on from this recording to write “The House Is Rockin’,” “Tightrope,” and “Wall of Denial” for Stevie Ray Vaughan. –Ted Drozdowski