Martin Ballard

Bio

Martin Ballard is a sixth-generation Kentuckian who grew up two hours north of Nashville, where boys were expected to choose between guitar or basketball. Being near-sighted, asthmatic and bewildered by sports, he chose piano. A psychiatrist was consulted. He was shown inkblots of guitars and repeatedly asked if he related to them as ‘male’ or ‘female.’ He replied, “neither and both but I like girls.”

Then he woke up in Geneva.

The guitar won, and it’s been his language ever since. Drawing comparisons to Richard Thompson—but with a deeper blues undercurrent—Ballard plays bottleneck 12-string in open tunings, conjuring a sound he describes as “where the Mississippi Delta meets the River Shannon.” There’s also a deeper thread: a growl in the back of the throat that he now suspects carries the memory of his Sephardic ancestry, recently discovered. His early attraction to dissonance, modal scales, and sudden shifts in vocal timbre—from choirboy clarity to backwoods blues—echoes the textures of Iberian folk and Jewish liturgical music. He’s also a not-so-amateur musicologist.

In 1986, after stints as a legislative intern in D.C. and the youngest full-time rock critic at a daily paper in Boulder, Ballard moved to Los Angeles and began publishing under the surname Martin Booe. Over the next 15 years, his voice—a sharp blend of insight, humor, and weirdness—appeared in hundreds of features across outlets ranging from the pre-Bezos Washington Post to Lazee Days RV Living. A deeply human writer, he was one of the last to work entirely in print before the walls fell.

His book Praise & Blame is a curated selection of these pieces, assembled quietly and almost sheepishly—“like putting up a display case when the museum’s already been bulldozed.” And yet it found its way into the hands of old readers and new admirers, who reminded him why he endured the rough ride of freelance journalism in the first place.

But music, always central, took deeper hold. He’s now written 99 songs and is preparing a “song-a-thon” to perform them all. Years ago, he co-wrote a significant portion of rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson’s autobiography but was pushed out before it was finished. The one thing he kept was her gift: during a vocal warm-up, she placed her cool fingers on his throat and said, “Move it to right here, hon.” And just like that, she unlocked his voice.

Today, Ballard makes art, music, and storytelling under the banner of Blues & Haikus, including work under his alter ego Ragged Bo Kaintock, a slide-playing mystic who shows up on dog portrait t-shirts and the occasional YouTube sermon. His guiding principle remains what Pete Seeger once told him in parting: get people singing together.

Martin Ballard is a sixth-generation Kentuckian whose work lives at the crossroads of folk music, art, and community storytelling. He grew up under the quiet but powerful influence of Wendell Berry, whose writings helped shape his sense of place, responsibility, and resistance.

In his early life, Ballard worked as a legislative intern on Capitol Hill before moving west — first to Boulder, where he became the youngest full-time rock critic at a daily newspaper, then to Los Angeles in 1986. He later ghostwrote a national bestseller, but prefers not to let that overshadow the heart of his work: songwriting, painting, and helping people connect through creative tradition.

He has written 99 songs to date and is preparing a marathon song-a-thon performance. At 19, he opened for folk legend John Hartford — a touchstone moment in a long, winding musical path. He’s also a painter with a raw, expressionistic style, often working under the name Ragged Bo Kaintock.

At the center of it all is a simple mission, passed to him by Pete Seeger himself: get people singing together. Whether through field manuals, porch songs, or painted dogs on t-shirts, Martin Ballard is building something rooted, soulful, and meant to be shared.