Nebraska-born singer-songwriter Laura Love opened her career with a particularly memorable debut performance. It wasn't held at a church or club or outdoor amphitheater; Love first took the stage at Nebraska State Penitentiary. She was 16.

"I was in high school and some professors at a nearby university had received a state grant to bring music to prisoners. The problem, though, is that they needed musicians willing to go into the prison, and they were so desperate they turned to the local high school," Love said in a telephone interview from her Seattle home.

"The professors were offering $50, which was a lot more than I was making at my after-school job at a fast-food restaurant," she said, "and I was like, 'I am so in.'"

Love, raised by a single mother who suffered from schizophrenia, was essentially on her own at that point and so "there weren't any adults around to tell me what to do."

"So the professors got me and a couple of session musicians and threw together this make-shift jazz prison band. The problem, though, is that one of the horn players had been smoking pot the evening before, and forgot that he'd stashed the marijuana in his bag. So when they were searching us at the penitentiary gate, they found his bag of drugs and kind of freaked out. They absolutely refused to let him in to play."

Short a man, the shy teenager  mounted the steps with her remaining band members.

"I was terrified out of my mind going up there. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to get or what the prisoners were going to do when they heard us. I mean, what kind of jazz group goes out on a stage without any kind of horn player?" she said. "Luckily, the prisoners — all of whom were men and much, much older — took pity on me. I guess I reminded them of their daughters back on the outside."

As the concert teetered forward, Love said, she began to realize how much she enjoyed music. "I was already thinking about maybe pursuing a life and a career in music," she said. "And, yes, it may have been a prison and, yes, our sound was totally off because we were short a man, but I did know one thing: Getting paid to play music sure beat flipping burgers."

Love, widely praised by critics, will bring her pioneering blend of African rhythms, Celtic melodies and folk- and jazz-inspired world music to Harrisburg on Friday, Nov. 21, for a performance at Whitaker Center's Stage Two.

Coming of age
The daughter of jazz saxophonist Preston Love, who played in the Count Basie Orchestra and backed up legends such as Billie Holiday, Love could hardly count her childhood as stable. Her father wasn't involved in her life, and her mother struggled with mental illness, so Love spent long stretches of her early years in foster care.

After finishing high school, she relocated to Seattle, where she took up with local bands. In 1989, she formed her own label, Octoroon Biography, on which she released her first four albums. Her eclectic sound has been described as everything from Afro-Celtic to "Hippalachia," a marriage of hip-hop and Appalachian bluegrass.

"For me, I guess, I just love the idea that America is where Europe and Africa met. The banjo, for example, is an African instrument, while the European violin, in America, turned into the fiddle," she said. "And for some reason, somehow, they make a sound that goes together.

"We have such a painful past in America," she said. "But the way I like to look at it is ... that the cultures may have met reluctantly, but the music they made was profound."

By the late '90s, Love was drawing major-label attention and released "Octoroon" on PolyGram in 1997, followed by "Shum Ticky" on Mercury in 1998. Then she got caught in a blood bath of a music-industry buyout. Seagram bought PolyGram, which owned Mercury, whose artists suddenly found themselves divided into three distinct groups: Acts that were clearly pop were folded into Island Records; hip-hop artists went to Def Jam Recordings; and country stars became part of the new Mercury Nashville label. Those who didn't fit neatly into any of those categories found themselves out of a contract.

Political involvement
Since then, Love said, she's been playing music festivals and splitting time between her solo career and her band, Harpers Ferry. In the off-season, she builds houses in the Seattle area with her partner, a carpenter.

Currently, she's back home in Seattle recovering from the Sing Out the Vote Ohio Tour, which encouraged voter participation in Ohio leading up to Election Day.

"I'm stunned by this last election, just stunned. As a biracial American, I never thought I'd see the day come when we would have a black president," Love said. "I just wanted to support Senator Obama however I could, and those of us on the tour would like to think our hard work paid off, just a little bit, in helping to turn the Buckeye State blue."

As she has traveled the country performing in theaters and festivals, Love has grown "concerned" about the direction the United States appears to be headed.

"The middle class is disappearing in America," Love said. "You can see it on the festival circuit because fewer and fewer folks out there have enough extra cash even to go out and see a concert.

"With Sing Out the Vote, I wanted to try and do what I could. Not just to support Senator Obama, but to try and get America back on the right track economically."

Laura Love will appear with guitarist Orville Johnson at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21, on Stage Two at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg. The concert is sponsored by Susquehanna Folk Music Society. For more information, call 214-2787 or visit www.whitakercenter.org.