Bonni McKeown

About me

Writer, blues promoter, piano player, community activist—Bonni McKeown is known on the West Side of Chicago for promoting the revival of community blues music and the career of heritage singer Larry Taylor. In her home state of West Virginia, she co-founded the Charleston Blues Society and wrote a biography Peaceful Patriot, published by Mountain State Press in in 1980, about her college classmate Tom Bennett, a conscientious objector who died serving as a U.S. Army medic in Vietnam.

Bonni wrote for daily newspapers in the 1970s in Virginia and West Virginia, and, 50 years later, for Chicago community news organizations City Bureau and Austin Weekly News. Her work appears in the West Virginia Encyclopedia and in the poetry anthology Wild Sweet Notes, and on Chicago’s Maxwell Street Foundation website music history page.  Her feature film based on Taylor's family story, “The Rhythm and the Blues,” is currently under production by co-writer and director Darryl Pitts.