>>PREVIEW
BELTLINE BLUES FESTIVAL
Maurice John Vaughn
June 23-25
Victoria Riverside Park
It’s amazing how many talents are discovered through necessity. Take blues guitarist Maurice John Vaughn, for example. This is the guitarist who came to the attention of blues legend Phil Guy in 1979 and later toured with the likes of Luther Allison and Son Seals.
So, he’s a good guitarist, you’re saying. If that were all, Vaughn would be famous enough. Aside from his skill at blues guitar, Maurice is known throughout the business as a performer, songwriter, producer, and most recently, a photographer. And it all came out of necessity.
"I’m an amateur photographer," says Maurice of a project he worked on a few years ago. "But that grew out of necessity, too, because the record companies we were dealing with, they only send a certain amount of money and once you ran outta money they weren’t going to give you anymore. So with these pictures having to be done, everybody wanted 400 or 500 bucks to do the pictures, I ended up saying, ‘Hey, let me get a nice camera and let’s start doing some of this because I can take them well enough to do some CD cover…."It may be that all of Vaughn’s talents have grown because he hates to get halfway through a project.
"I hate to get in the middle of something and run out of money, which I’ve done so many times and then you’re waiting on other people, and well, maybe we’re going to do this and then no, they pull out and then they leave you." It may also be because he found himself "doing it all" in the 1980s. Maurice played, produced, recorded and financed his 1984 vinyl record Generic Blues Album, later released as a CD by Alligator Records in 1986. Vaughn proved then that he could do everything for that project and though it taught him some hard lessons, he’s still able to laugh about it.
"I learned I needed help," he says. "I need so much help, that’s what I learned from that. Basically, it’s just a momentous job and in order to do things properly you need some sort of help or you need the backing. A lot of people who have the backing don’t have the knowledge and the creativity to pull it off, so the marriage of the finances with the creativity makes a very good chance you have a great project."
Still, the experience didn’t dull his appetite for producing. That’s a talent he’s still sharpening through a recent project producing for bluesman Donald Ray Johnson and the new CD release for Shirley Johnson. So, while Vaughn acknowledges that like anyone else he can’t do it all, it’s clear that by most people’s standards he’s doing an amazing job at doing just that. |
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