Early Years
Ball was born Roland Sherwood Ball in Santa Monica, California, USA, and grew up in a musical family, the son of Frances (née Shankland) and Roland Adelbert Ball. His paternal grandfather, Ernest Ball, wrote the standard, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling and his father was a car salesman who taught Hawaiian steel guitar on the side. Although Ball initially picked up the steel at age nine to please his father, he became bored and gave it up. In his early teens he began to take a renewed interest in the instrument, practicing as many as three hours a day. Within a year he was a member of the Musicians Union.
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Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
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“We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.”
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