Don’t Let Those Small Hands Fool You: The Idgy Vaughn Interview

By R.U. Steinberg

Photographer: Todd Wolfson

Idgy has been called a human lighting rod. An unexpected brush fire sweeping across the Texas scrub. A loaded gun. Trouble. A professional redhead.

One thing is for sure. There is a lot more to Idgy Vaughn than her 5’ 3” frame might suggest. She can calmly tell an audience, while rolling her big eyes and letting out a winsome smile, that she is about to sing a song about killing her boyfriend, then follow up with a heart-warming story about helping calm her crying daughter to sleep.

Idgy is funny and tragic, she is folk, she is country, and she knows how to rock ‘n roll. A singer whose voice conjures a rare emotional quality--compared thus far to Iris Dement and Nanci Griffith--Idgy is also very passionate about being part of the Americana music movement. But If you are not into labels, you can sample her music yourself on myspace and on her web site.

Vaughn's self-released 2006 debut album includes a veritable Who’s Who in Folk & Country Music: producer/drummer Paul Pearcy (Darden Smith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Terri Hendrix); guitarists Redd Volkaert (Merle Haggard), Rob Gjersoe (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, The Flatlanders, The Greencards), Marvin Dykhuis (Tish Hinojosa, Jimmy LaFave, South Austin Jug Band); Guy Forsyth (solo artist and founding member of the Asylum Street Spankers); pedal steel player Lloyd Maines (Terri Hendrix, Joe Ely, Dixie Chicks, Richard Buckner); dobro player Cindy Cashdollar (Asleep at the Wheel, Bob Dylan); fiddler Eamon McLoughlin (The Greencards), keyboard players Riley Osbourn (Marcia Ball, Willie Nelson, W.C. Clark); Earl Poole Ball (Johnny Cash, The Byrds, Buck Owens, Gram Parsons); bassist Glenn Fukunaga (Eliza Gilkyson, Terri Hendrix, Dixie Chicks); and backup vocals from Ruthie Foster and Pauline Reese.

Perhaps her 10-year old daughter, Georgia, namesake of the song “The Pearl of Georgia,” puts it best. “My mom’s music really catches a lot of soul. That’s because she knows how to sing it in different tones and in a lot of keys. All of my mom’s songs are based on true things. She has really sad songs and can tell it like it really is.”

Idgy Vaughn’s love for Georgia comes across in her music, as do her heartbreaks and tough times. To put it simply, to know Idgy’s music is to kinda know Idgy’s life. But if you’re looking for the CliffsNoteseque version, here goes:

• Idgy Vaughn was born on a Missouri hog farm, but her family soon settled in Quincy, Illinois. They moved into a house near a cemetery (this comes into play later, musically) and Idgy began to explore songwriting around age 10.
  
• She grew up, had a baby in her early 20s, then started to play in the local coffee shop, but lost the local talent show to Christian karaoke singers seven years in a row.
  
• One day, a friend told her that Austin was the Live Music Capital of the world and she decided to move, much to her family’s protest (this comes into play later, too). She found a job waitressing at a truckstop in the Austin suburb of Buda (yes, another song).
  
• Soon after, Idgy became friends with one of her customers, an older man who is a fan of her music. The man later became ill, but Idgy provided care for him. He won the lottery and decided to give her just enough money to finance an album.
  
• In 2004, she won the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters. Immediately after winning, she was faced with a custody battle against her parents for Georgia—a battle she eventually won.
  
• By 2006, Idgy completed her full-length debut, Origin Story, which she released on her own Fallen Woman Records.
  
• At SXSW 2006, she gave an early demo of the album to Bob Harris of BBC Radio 2. He played it live from Austin and she developed an instant UK fan base.
  
• On August 11, 2006, David Brown of NPR declared “Good Enough” as song of the day.
  
• Margaret Moser of the Austin Chronicle listed her as the Number One Austin album of 2006
  
• March 1, 2007 was declared Idgy Vaughn Day by the City of Austin.
  
• Idgy Vaughn can often be spotted drinking Red Bull.

Idgy was well received in Nashville in September 2006, where she performed three shows around the Americana Music Festival and Conference. Now, she is about to embark on a summer tour of the south and mid-Atlantic states. PCP caught up with Idgy to talk about where she’s been and what’s going on.

PCP
I hear you did some throat singing on Origin Story. (Ed. note: also called “overtone singing,” throat singing allows a performer to simultaneously sing with two or more voices).

Idgy
Yes that’s at the end of “Attic Window.” A lot times, people think it’s electric guitar feedback. Ruthie Foster is singing this kind of freeform Middle Eastern scat and I’m throat singing in the background.

PCP
That song sounds very different from the others on the album and has an addictive beat.

Idgy
One of the luxuries of making Origin Story was being able to do some stuff like that. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that in any other studio, to have people around me who were open to it and who enabled me to do that. I was kind of ignorant going into it.
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PCP
How about naïve?

Idgy
There certainly was that Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney type situation like, “Hey, let’s put on a musical” and they put some curtains up in the barn, everyone shows up, and there is an incredible dancing and singing extravaganza. It would have really smacked of that had it not been for Paul Pearcy and Eastside Flash not only knowing, but being able to tell what I wanted to say. Going into it, I didn’t know the language of the recording studio and now I probably know the equivalent of Spanglish. I can’t wait to go back in and get started on the next record. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have this overwhelming feeling it’s going to be a good experience.

PCP
Speaking of people helping you, you recently got Joe Estrada promoting you to the radio and John Laird as a booking agent.

Idgy
It’s incredibly important having people on your team. When payola is not an option, which is the case with most independent artists, it is hard to compete with major label releases. Last summer, Origin Story was in the Top 100 of the Americana Music Association’s chart and made top 40 for six weeks, peaking at 29 or 30. I don’t want to dog on any other artist—God bless ‘em—but it’s nice to be able to look at the list and know you’re right there with the major labels. I am grateful for every single deejay who plays my record. When they’re playing your record, they’ve got a lot of people spending a lot of money to convince them to play 10 other people’s records.

PCP
Your attention to detail is one of the most awesome aspects of your music. You just don’t take words and throw them out there. You write a song about a waitress at a truckstop, which has been done before, but you include lots of details in a clever way.

Idgy
Kat (the waitress in the song “Truckstop Waitresses”) had a story that made that so super easy because every word in that song was true.

PCP
You also like to write about stories that you haven’t experienced like “St. Francis Fire.” (Editor’s note: The song is based on a fire at a Christmas pageant in 1899 in Quincy, Illinois that claimed the lives of 12 girls.)

Idgy
I dreamt about Bernadina Freund (the girl in the song) for 10 years before I wrote the song. I got the details of the story from the Quincy newspaper. When I was a child, we moved into a house right next door to the cemetery. It was at a time when I wasn’t very socially skilled and there was a lot of upheaval at home, so I spent a lot of time in that cemetery wandering around and doing a lot of reading. When I wrote that song, I felt I had to get it right and if I screwed up some detail it would be so disrespectful. One of the worst things about that tragedy was the little parts of the story that came out in the days and weeks after the fire. When Bernadina’s father arrived on the scene, he walked past a girl who was unrecognizable because of the burns and she called out to him, but he said, “I have to find my daughter.” By the time he realized the girl who had called out to him was in fact his daughter, she was dead. I thank God I didn’t know that detail when I wrote the song because the song would never have gotten written. The whole song would have been about that moment and I don’t know if I could have lived enough in that moment to finish. I look at my daughter, Georgia, and I was pregnant with her when I finished the song. I don’t know what you do to come back from that tragedy. There’s a piano part the song is based on that I wrote when I was 10 or 11 years old.

PCP
So you were writing songs as a child? I understand that your mom used to ask you not to sing.

Idgy
We had a piano when we lived on the farm. The piano belonged to a babysitter and when I was at her house I would play it. The babysitter eventually moved and ended up giving the piano to us. When we lost the farm, we left it in the farmhouse and it stayed there for years. When I was about 10 or 11, I cried and cried for that piano, so my parents went back to the abandoned farmhouse—no one had been living there—and they stole it back from the raccoons. It’s one of those melodies that has always been with me. There are a couple more melodies like that. The violin solo Eamon McLoughlin plays in “The Pearl of Georgia” is a piece I wrote about the same time. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t humming those melodies. It makes me wonder what kind of commercials I was hearing when I was really little. I wonder if subconsciously I’m playing some peanut butter jingle.

PCP
Speaking of your childhood, it’s probably appropriate now for a clichéd music writer question. What was your first guitar, where did you get it, who gave it to you, and do you still have it?

Idgy
From the time I first knew the word guitar I wanted one. Some girls dream about Barbies, I dreamt about guitars. The closest I ever got was this toy called the Magical Musical Thing, which was woefully inadequate. Then when I was 10 or 11, my dad lost his job right before Christmas. But he found a Lotus guitar as a present, which is practically subhuman—better for starting a fire or using to paddle a boat. This was the one guitar Lotus ever made that stayed in tune, had decent intonation. Something must have gone wrong at the factory. And thank God it did. It was a nylon string with a hollow, classical construction, but dipstick me immediately put steel strings on it.

PCP
But you were 10 years old. Didn’t anyone help you?

Idgy
Nobody told me anything. I hated going to the music store in Quincy. The people there were too busy making fun of me for being a little girl coming in to buy guitar strings. It was like walking the gauntlet, the musical equivalent of the spanking machine, like dodge ball on the worst day of 4th grade. I would get into the music store, then got the hell out as fast as I could. Later, the guys at the music store were like, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you writing your own songs when there are perfectly good songs already written by bands like Poison. If you had any talent you would be able to play them like they sound on the radio.” I never had lessons—they could barely afford the guitar. It was hard on my fingers. I have small hands and when I was 10 or 11 they were a lot smaller. I had permanent creases on my leg and the top of my armpit from hitching my arm over the guitar because it was so big.

PCP
Do you still have the guitar?

Idgy
Yes, but when my daughter was 3 or 4 she stepped on it and kinda crushed the inside. I remember hearing the sound of it crushing—it was horrible. She had a turbulent relationship with my guitar. Time I spent playing could have been time she spent sitting on my lap. I keep the guitar because it is too much of a conversation piece. Once when I was a kid, my little sister got really mad at me and tried to carve the word “Bitch” onto it. I caught her at the “I” so it has a giant “BI” on it. We were horrible to each other growing up. I may very well have had that coming to me.

PCP
In your biography, it mentions that you were a deejay briefly.

Idgy
I was always in trouble for going off the playlist. I was a disk jockey about the time that Poison, Guns n’ Roses, and that whole L.A. scene was in its heyday. Then all of a sudden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana came along and they were so incredibly different from the crap you had to play, you went crazy over it. I had the worst crush on Eddie Vedder and I don’t know why. I’ve never been able to see them live. In fact, most of the groups and songwriters that I would consider my favorites, I’ve never been able to catch live and I’ve seen an incredible amount of live music.

PCP
Like?

Idgy
The list is long. The group that blew me away was the Violent Femmes. When I was 15, I hitched a ride with these older kids to Springfield, Illinois to see the Violent Femmes open for the B-52s at the Illinois State Fair. They all wanted to go and all had tickets, but nobody had any money so I ponied up the gas money so that they would let me sit in the very, very back of the station wagon. You’ve never seen anyone more grateful than I was that day. I had never seen them before so I didn’t know they were only three guys. I remember when they came on stage I was thinking, “Well, where’s the rest of them?” I was just floored that so much sound was coming from just three people. I hadn’t had that record in at least 10 years and the other day I was looking around at Waterloo Records at their used CDs and there it was and I got it. I was walking out to my truck thinking, “If this is just half as good as I remember it being, that would be so great.” And it was just as good. Knowing what I know now, I can see why it resonated so much with me when I was 13 and 14.

PCP
This will sound ignorant, but I am surprised that people in Quincy, Illinois had heard of the Violent Femmes.

Idgy
I only knew about them because my older sister had a boyfriend who gave her the tape and she didn’t like it. I could tell you where every dirty word appeared on that record because whenever I listened to it I would sit by the jambox and turn it down really quickly, then turn it back up. My folks never knew. I listened to them, I listened to the Everly Brothers and Patsy Cline. I also listened to the Go-Gos—I was a huge fan. Recently, I played a show at Flipnotics in Austin and didn’t realize Kathy Valentine was also on the bill. Just as I was getting there, she was leaving. I was so bummed I missed her set, but I was lucky because coincidentally I almost wore my bright pink Go-Gos T-shirt that night. I would have looked like a total dork.

PCP
Speaking of your family, what’s going on?

Idgy
I choose to not be involved with my folks or my two sisters. My younger sister still lives in Quincy, which is where my parents are. If I could ever figure out a way to have a very marginal, smaller relationship with my folks, that would be one thing. But there is no such thing because you can’t be in my family without being made to choose sides. My older sister lives in Santa Monica and we weren’t in touch for a long time. Not too long ago, I contacted her and it just started the whole thing over again. If I maintain a relationship with these people, then I am choosing to have even more chaos in an already busy and somewhat chaotic life just given the nature of being a musician. My mom is on permanent Social Security disability for having borderline personality disorder. But it is very hard to figure out where that disorder ends and crappy behavior comes in.

PCP
It sounds like although they weren’t supportive of your music, that it was your move to Austin that caused all hell to break loose.

Idgy
2004 was the year. Somebody told me I was going to get everything I ever wanted and lose everything I ever had and at the end of the day I was going to have to decide what was worth the trade.

PCP
Was this person a psychic?

Idgy
No. It was from one of my friends as an offhand comment before the Kerrville Folk Festival. But I actually did see a psychic that same weekend and she said I was going to have a very quiet year at home and that I wasn’t going to win New Folk at Kerrville.

PCP
Well, the professional psychic wasn’t as psychic your friend.

Idgy
When I first moved to Austin, I decided that Georgia was going to finish kindergarten in Quincy and I was going to have 4-5 months to get things going, get my own apartment. At the time, my mom had been in a really good place mentally for a while. My parents told me they would take care of Georgia, but that I had to make them temporary guardians of her, so they could enroll her in school, get medical care for her if necessary, etc. I thought it was the responsible thing to do. What I didn’t know is that when I signed the guardianship paper is that my mom took some white-out and changed the length of time from one year to three years. It went through the court system marked as three years and I had no idea. Georgia finished up school, I went to pick her up, brought her to Austin, no big deal. She was with me all summer, went through first grade with no big incident, then at the end of her first grade year I got into the New Folk competition at Kerrville. She went to visit my folks for two weeks while I was at New Folk. When my mom first told me they weren’t letting Georgia back down, I was thinking it was mom being all weird and I could either feed it or choose not to react to see if it would go away.

PCP
Your love for Georgia really comes out in your music. And she is your #1 fan. There is something very endearing about her running your CD booth and promoting you. And I understand she also helps you sing once in a while.

Idgy
Sometimes, when I’m playing a gig, she’ll come help sing the howling during “Redbone Hound.” When we were recording the record, she came in. We gave her a pair of headphones, put her in front of a microphone, and she sang along with some of the songs. I wanted her to have that experience so that she could remember we had done that. As soon as we were done, she came into the control room and demanded payment for the session.

PCP
As you have said in your blog, she is 10 going on 40. She’s also really good with numbers and saving money?

Idgy
She almost consistently has money when I don’t.

PCP
You’re not working the waitress job anymore since the truckstop closed. Yet the job provided you with inspiration. Do you miss it? Where are you getting your inspiration from now?

Idgy
First of all, I don’t miss waitressing a bit. If I had to, I could go into the studio right now and record a record from old material. But that’s not the kind of record I want to make. I don’t want to feel like I’m limited by the material that exists in the form it is in right now. The biggest challenge for the second record will be looking at what already exists and determining if it is OK as is or if it will need to be changed.

PCP
Describe your songwriting process.

Idgy
Every song is different. Some songs, I’ll start with a lyric and I may have one line sitting around forever, then the rest of the song shows up. It’s like putting puzzle pieces together. Sometimes, I start with the music first. Sometimes, you get the first part of the song, then it takes 10 years for the rest to show up. Some songs knock on your door like a visitor and are totally there. “Good Enough” is one of those songs. It was almost like it arrived finished, then all I had to do was learn how to play it. But that’s so much the exception.

PCP
How did Paul Pearcy help you with “Good Enough"?

Idgy
It arrived as one line. He told me I needed to finish it. Today. And basically that’s what happened. It was a situation where on a Monday or Tuesday of one week he said, “That’s the line. Now go finish the song.” And by the same time the following week, all the basic tracks had already been recorded and I’m walking around Town Lake listening to two versions of the song. In one version, Lloyd Maines is doing all of the solos on pedal steel and in the other version Riley Osbourn is playing all the solos on V3. We were trying to decide who would get the majority of the song and it ended up being Riley because what he did to that song changed it. (In the final cut) it was so great to be able to pick and choose between the best of what they did. Less than a week later, Bob Harris from the BBC was playing “Good Enough” on the radio. It was during SXSW and I had just met him. I didn’t even know who he was. It was amazing. I was down at the Austin Convention Center. I went out to the balcony to bum a cigarette—this was back when I still used to smoke. There was a British guy who had just gotten off an international flight and had Marlboro Reds, which I used to smoke. I was a horrible smoker. I got so bad at the end that I would get mad that I couldn’t smoke two at the same time.

PCP
Was it hard for you to quit? Any songs coming from that experience?

Idgy
It was horrible. No songs from quitting smoking because I’d end up having a nic fit in the middle of it. Here’s the true thing about songwriting. If you write a song about the worst moment of your life, which I have done a couple of times now, in order to be true to your song you must tell the truth about the whole thing. You have to be careful because you think, “How much do I really want everyone to know about it, how much can I tell without having to tell all of it, and how much do I have to tell to explain the story?” Some things are better left to the imagination. I also have to think what is this going to do to the people around me who were there when it happened. I don’t think I have anymore worst moments than anyone else, I’ve just written songs about them. Everyone else can conveniently forget it, I get to relive it over and over again in front of audiences.

Also, when I quit smoking, I lost the ability to sing. It was like going from a violin to a cello—really weird. I had to relearn where the notes were. I was all over the place. It was like driving and the steering wheel comes off in your hands. I couldn’t really afford to take lots of singing lessons. But Mady Kaye was in the studio making sure I was pronouncing words. She gave me some discipline I didn’t have before. She taught me some really simple things that have made singing a lot easier and stopped some bad habits that were preventing me from being able to form a song the way my internal songwriter dictated—when this is the melody and there is a high note here and there is a reason for it. Melodically, emotionally, and lyrically it must be this note, but if I’m there standing with a guitar in my hands freaking out every time I play the song because I don’t know whether or not I’ll hit that note, then the whole song is going to suck and I’m not ever going to want to play that song because I’m to feel a lot of anxiety, like a failure.

PCP
So back to the British guy…

Idgy
Ok, so I wanted to bum a cigarette and he told me he would trade me one if I had a demo. I said fine, but told him he’d have to give me two cigarettes because this demo was worth at least two Marlboro Reds. He told me if it was any good he would give it to his friend Roy who knows Bob Harris from the BBC. I was thinking, “Yeah right.” Then, I went to a panel discussion, an hour or so passed. Before I got to smoke the second cigarette, some guy named Roy was calling me from his cell phone. He explained they were going out to eat that night and Bob would probably be there and he really wanted me to meet Bob. I wasn’t sure what to think or what kind of girl they thought I was. I am a female musician, which is loosely translated by a lot of people into meaning something completely different than it is. So I turned them down. It was SXSW and I had a lot of things to do that night. He called me again at about 9 o’clock that night, said they were going out to eat at 10, and told me he really hoped I would meet them. He said the magic word—Truluck’s—and I was hungry by then. I love Truluck’s and that’s eating pretty high on the hog for me. I went there and ended up having a two hour dinner, pretty much missed everything I had planned to see, so I went home. At some point really late that night, I checked my e-mail and discovered it was crashed. What I didn’t know was that in the interim, Bob listened to “Good Enough” and had broadcasted it live from Austin to the UK on BBC Radio 2. They even gave out my e-mail address, which filled my inbox and it stopped working. Jake, my web guy, tried to fix it. We thought it was spam. I didn’t realize what had happened. God bless Bob Harris. I’m telling you, man, I love him.

PCP
Another clichéd question…do you have any hobbies?

Idgy
I belong to the gym but I never go. I knit for fun. At any given point, I am working on a different project—I have a short attention span. For a while, I was into making dish clothes. They’re small projects mainly. I read a lot about epidemiology as it pertains to history. I’m a history buff and I’ve been reading a lot about the pandemic of 1917-1918. I’m very interested in what happened.

PCP
Ah, history like “St. Francis Fire.” Anything historical in what you have been working on recently?

Idgy
I’m working on a song called “Sweet Delphine.” It takes place at the tail end of the Great Depression. It’s about a guy who moves away from his folks after he loses his job. Then he rides the rails as a migrant laborer. As the Great Depression winds down, he has some money in his pocket so he looks for his family, but can’t find them. But in the process he meets Delphine and they fall in love and get married. Then something goes wrong—Delphine gets murdered and he is wrongfully accused. Even though he didn’t do it, he takes the rap for it because he is so despondent.

PCP
Playing out live, you’ve played with a drummer, you’ve played with another acoustic guitar player, you’ve played solo. Are you assembling a new band to tour with? What are your future plans?

Idgy
I have a drummer named Mike Meadows and he mostly plays percussion. He is really phenomenally talented and really well respected as a man around town. He attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He still hasn’t finished school because he has been touring with porterdavis and the band became so busy. From my understanding, Berklee has a pretty interesting enrollment policy in that it expected students to have gaps in their education due to touring. Sarah Glynn, who is a singer/songwriter in her own right, plays guitar. Kevin Carroll was playing guitar with us, but ended up touring with Charlie Robison in Iraq. People have busy schedules and the reason why they do is because they’re good and their skills are in demand. Creatively, I feel like I have been in a good place for a long time. For me, that has always been the easy part. The hard part is all the life things that screw up plans and business plans that can go wrong. That’s the white noise interference that has constantly been problematic.

PCP
But some of that white noise has driven your music….

Idgy
Yes, but I think I already have enough songs about dealing with disappointment.

PCP
And what about your tour?

Idgy
I love to drive. I’m getting a conversion van for my tour in the early summer. I’m going to go out there and hope for the best. So far, I have dates scheduled in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Things might change—you never know when you are on the road.