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All Music Guide:
Over the past several years, Laura Love has become quite acclaimed in the Northwest music scene as an unparalleled vocalist, bassist, and songwriter. Love's style is a synthesis of inner-city funk and folk-ish sensibility. One of the most difficult tasks for a musician is to find an apt label for her music; folk/funk, African/Appalachian, and House/Celtic have been bandied about for Laura Love. Whatever you choose to call it, Love's original music is at once fresh, def, and rooted in tradition.
Although a popular headliner in her own right, she has opened for John Lee Hooker, Lyle Lovett, Bo Diddley, Karla Bonoff, and Elayne Boosler and been invited to perform at a number of folk and eclectic music festivals.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Laura Love began her career at the age of 16, singing jazz and pop standards at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Since then, Love has played in a blues- grunge outfit, in a duo, trio, and in the funny feminist foursome, Venus Envy. Love has released three albums: Menstrual Hut (1989), Z Therapy (1990), and Pangaea (1993), all on her own label, Octoroon Biography. Shum Ticky followed in 1998 and Fourteen Days arrived in 2000 on Zoe Records.
Wikipedia:
Laura Love (born 1960) is an American singer and bass guitar player.
Biography
Love was born Laura Jones in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1960. She is of African American, Native American, and Caucasian descent. Love had a difficult childhood, raised by a mother with schizophrenia and in foster homes. Her father, who had little involvement in her life, was the jazz musician Preston Love who played sax with Count Basie, Lucky Millander and Johnny Otis and formed his own band in the 1950s. Love's mother, Wini, had been a singer in Preston's jazz band.
Career
Love began her performing career at age 16, singing for the prisoners at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Love relocated to Seattle, Washington, where she was a member of the late 1980s rock group Boom Boom G.I. She was also a member of an all-female band, Venus Envy.
After Love released three albums on her own label, Octoroon Biography, Putumayo released a collection of her songs. Her album Welcome to Pagan Place included the controversial song "I Want You Gone", about George W. Bush. She published an autobiography, You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes, with an accompanying album of the same name, in 2004. Her style has been described as "Afro-Celtic" and has also been influenced by bluegrass.
