When Tarriona “Tank” Ball and her family evacuated New Orleans in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, she had no idea just how much her life was about to change.
The lead vocalist and frontperson of the Grammy-winning band Tank and the Bangas, Ball was only a senior in high school when Katrina ravaged New Orleans and surrounding areas in late August of 2005, killing at least 1,392 people (accounts vary), displacing roughly 1.5 million, and submerging 80 percent of the city in dangerous, debris-filled water.
At the urging of then-New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, Ball’s family packed up their car and headed to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they joined other family members who also chose to evacuate. They convinced her grandparents, who did not want to leave, to please reconsider, a decision that she says undoubtedly saved their lives. The drive, which would normally take just under two hours, took all day, as evacuees navigated bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to make their way to safety.
“We thought we were only going to be gone for a day or two,” Ball tells Rolling Stone. “You know, no big deal. Never thought that we would never return — because even though you return months later, you still never return to the thing which you left. Everything is different.”
Ball and her family wound up relocating to Indianapolis, where she finished high school away from the friendships and community she’d spent her life building. Senior year is a tender, meaningful time for many teenagers, and Ball says missing out on that period of celebration with her classmates was “absolutely devastating.”
At the time, social media was in its infancy, with MySpace just two years old and Facebook not yet widely adopted. Ball says that MySpace became a way to keep in touch with her former classmates, most of whom were also displaced and spread out across the region.
“We were the type of community where people’s families literally lived right around the corner from them, or in the same apartment complex or the same projects,” she says. “Everybody was very close. So, the internet, MySpace, that was our way of connecting and finding our classmates that we lost, our friends.”
One of the world’s most vibrant hubs for arts of all kinds, New Orleans — in addition to the devastating loss of life, property, and infrastructure — lost its arts community as it once existed, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by community rebuilding efforts. Ball explains that reinvigorating the New Orleans art scene was about more than just replacing what was gone; it was a way for people to heal.
She points to a handful of community efforts that were especially meaningful to her, including an open mic at Liberation Lounge, where she met her future bandmates, and Pass It On NOLA Open Mic, a beloved spoken-word series that still runs today.
“Those two open mics that weren’t going on pre-Katrina were really special to a lot of people,” she says. “It was rebuilding the infrastructure back up in its own way, especially for poets and music lovers and even for teachers. Some of those open mics were the kind of places you go when you’re just having a bad day, or even just to talk about [the storm]. It was so communal when we needed that.”
Ball feels that these early efforts to create community arts spaces helped the drowned city retain its special spirit and culture, explaining that “the city needs that type of rhythm.” She says that walking around in New Orleans is like walking with headphones on, because there is music everywhere, whether in the literal sense or in the natural sounds and happenings that permeate daily city life.
“It’s music,” she says. “It’s all around and it helps us get along. It helps us get on our journey and better equips us on our way. So, the city needed the pulse, it needed the rhythm, it needed the music. It needed the poetry scene to come back strong. And I was a part of that.”
Asked if any moments during this time of rebirth stuck out as especially meaningful, Ball shares that she and her poetry group, Slam New Orleans, hosted a celebration of the city next to one of the failed levees that caused such catastrophic flooding in the city. The group prayed over the levee, holding hands and touching it, while footage-hungry media outlets filmed them in their moment of grief.
“We’re weeping to each other and there are cameras in our faces,” she says. “It was so weird and so odd. It was a moment where we were just remembering what was… For a camera to be in your face trying to capture a human moment, it was really off-putting.”
Twenty years on, these memories — good and bad — still stir strong emotions in Ball, who is able to see and appreciate how the tragic disaster had some silver linings. She cites people starting new businesses, becoming first-time homeowners, “finding a new lease on life” and simply leaving the city for the first time, learning more about the broader world in the process.
For her, the storm and its aftermath led to what would become her artistic and musical community: Tank and the Bangas would be born a few years later.
“If it never happened, I know that I wouldn’t be who I am today, and I love who I am today,” she says. “I needed to be who I am today. I had to come into myself. I had to get out of my comfort zone in New Orleans to come into myself.”
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