Laura Love

Just try to describe Laura Love’s musical style in one word. Her open-minded approach to genre sticks critics with an adjective traffic jam: Afro-Celtic-bluegrass-funk-political-rock … and that’s when we’re just getting warmed up. You Ain’t Got No Easter Clothes, a companion CD to Love’s memoir of the same name, is her musical autobiography. It tells the story of her growing-up years in Nebraska, where being both dirt-poor and African-American made her as different as one can get. Songs like the title track, with its refrain of “What you got / Is diddly squat,” make pretty clear where she’s coming from. The good news for us is that, out of what Love’s PR folks call a “rough and tumble life,” we get some of the most original and fully American music you can find in any genre.