DENVER, COLO. (4/17/08) -- Singer, songwriter, bassist, and published author Laura Love has thousands of fans throughout North America and Europe. She returns to Swallow Hill on Saturday, May 10 at 8 p.m. with her latest release, NeGrass (2007).

Her 10th CD on her label, Octoroon Biography, it is an acoustic collection of traditional and original field hollers, Negro spirituals and folk songs, produced by Barbara Lamb and recorded in Nashville with some of the finest bluegrass musicians in North America. NeGrass features Love singing and playing bass with Tim O'Brien, Tracy Nelson, Barbara Lamb, Jeff Autry, Scott Vestal, Rob Ickes, Mike Bub and Alice Vestal, most of whom are Grammy and IBMA award winners.

There is a personal and historic theme to NeGrass. It is something of a family history—Laura takes what she knows of her great grandparents' lives and imagines how it might have been for them around the end of the Civil War as they were being freed from slavery and embarking into an unfamiliar world, and is a lovely, heartbreaking, and joyful piece of work.

An African-American funk bassist with an astonishing voice, she is equally influenced by blues and bluegrass, jazz, folk, gospel, reggae and country. Regardless of how she is described, Love has an uncanny ability to get her audience to listen beyond their own musical boundaries. Utne Reader writes that she is "(One of) 40 artists who will shake the world. The clincher is her live show...She's that rare artist who can slip from sensitive folk to hip-hop without skipping a beat."