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Laura Love
 "I
always loved bass guitar," cult folk singer-songwriter Laura Love reveals to Rosie Clarke. "Maybe because me and the bass have so much in common - big, funky, chunky bottom, lots of percussion and movement!"
Love's challenging childhood is reflected in her stirring music, which conveys both the good and bad of American life. "My sister, mother and I were the only black folks in our school and neighbourhood. I was called 'Nigger' a lot. I was constantly being met by this authority or that social worker who'd tell me my mother had been committed to another institution, or that we'd been evicted or something equally unpleasant. My mom had another 'nervous breakdown' and we moved to the Omaha ghetto. The whole neighbourhood had been burned up and shot up and I then became the only 'white' kid in an all-black school as they thought I walked and talked funny and was way too light to be trusted. It was a huge cultural awareness lesson for me."
Writing her memoir, 'You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes', and the accompanying album helped Love deal with "A lot of things that were still hard for me to face. I wrote most every night for over a year. Some nights I went to bed feeling like I was eight years old and helpless again. My greatest hope was that people who'd never experienced things like poverty, mental illness, racism and powerlessness could get some sense of what it feels like." Without help from other people and the power of music, Love believes "I'd have been stealing and doping and blowing things up just like lots of the people I met."
Love's salvation came through listening incessantly to the radio. "It used to be very good before these huge media corporations took it over and made it bland, inane and formulaic. DJs used to introduce new songs of every conceivable genre - I used to hear people like Laura Nyro, James Brown, The Weavers, Flatt & Scruggs and Sly And The Family Stone on the same station in the same hour, heavy doses of folk and funk and jazz and pop."
Her song Ain't No Power describes the compelling experience of "Walking home from school in the ghetto, [I] saw all these black people gathering in the street with signs protesting the living conditions and lack of opportunity for jobs and schools and housing. I'd never seen a whole lot of people amass and get mad about how we were treated. Seeing firsthand how unevenly things [were] run in the United States made me pretty interested in politics, wanting our leaders to be concerned about all of us - not just the richest, whitest, male-est ones!"
Love is a vocal activist. "I am often ashamed of my country and its leaders and I voice my opinions in my songs. I'm certainly not a folk singer in order to get rich, so I might as well say what I want! It gets harder and harder to make a living at music, with downloading and all sorts of restrictions put on us as entertainers to censor ourselves and not 'offend' our government, or speak out against the war. The music industry's in big trouble - the only music surviving is monster mega pop crap that makes me want to hurl. I found that the smaller the label, the more freedom I had to speak my mind - now I've spoken my mind off every label out there except my own!"
What can Love's audience at the Adelaide Fringe expect? "I will be thumpin' on the bass, and the divine Ms Barbara Lamb will be playing the fiddle and singing along with me. We'll be playing lots of songs from the new CD, 'NeGrass', a blend of Negro spirituals, slave songs, field hollers and bluegrass and Old Time music. My great-grandparents were undoubtedly slaves - this whole CD is based on what I imagine the journey northward must have been like for them as they escaped the American south and slavery and cotton plantations. I'm very excited that the first audience to hear it will be Australian. I can't wait to bring my big, fat, gay, black, commie music to your lovely country. Do you think," she teases, "I should put John Howard on the guest list?"
Laura Love plays at the Garden Of Unearthly Delights as part of the Fringe Festival on Tue 13 and Wed 14 March
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