Bonni Helps Highlight West Side Blues for Heritage, Tourism
In 2017, hosted by local travel agent Crystal Dyer, Larry Taylor and Bonni met with IL State Reps. Camille Lilly and La Shawn K. Ford to highlight blues as a local asset for community development. Nine years later, their persistence shows up in the area media, such as this article in the West Side Magazine and Austin Chicago Weekly News
Bonni helped found a West Side writers group in 2024 with Keli Stewart and Am Bornfree. Keli has gone on to present many more cultural programs at her Front Porch Arts Center.
“Bonni's CAN-TV interview with Larry Taylor on his history and music, first aired July 26, 2019.”
“Bonni is interviewed with Urban Grind TV on the value of old fashioned barrelhouse blues and her current projects including Larry Taylor's CD "New Chicago Sounds.” - Urban Grind TV
“British music fan Tony Moore interviews Bonni with Larry Taylor on the history and significance of the blues. And why it needs to keep going! He follows up with a talk with us about educating youth and passing the music on.” - Tony Moore
— youtube
“Blues lyrics often invoke themes of pain, injustice, and violence. After all, it was the suffering and inhumanity of slavery and “Jim Crow” laws that helped create the blues as a form of creative expression. So it’s fitting the genre would be used to address the violence and anger currently affecting the Chicago area. Musician and blues crusader Bonni McKeown joined with community groups and the Larry Taylor Blues & Soul Band to hold events on the West and South Sides to showcase the music’s healing nature. “The basic function of the blues is the healing of the community, its survival,” McKeown insists. “One person can’t solve these problems, but the music is uplifting, it builds morale.” Over the last several months, McKeown, who also goes by her stage name Barrelhouse Bonni, delivered her punchy talents to community events that are working to strengthen neighborhoods and build support systems to highlight the cultural heritage and power of the music. “The whole idea is respect, honor, and reconnection,” she says. “We’re trying to reintroduce the music to generations that might not have connected with it before.” ” - Rosalind Cummings-Yates "Sweet Home"
“Last week Rock for Kids hosted a two-hour workshop at Buddy Guy's Legends. The organization hooked up with Chicago HOPES, a branch of Chicago Public Schools that tutors children living in shelters. Chicago HOPES brought 115 children and mothers from Chicago shelters to Legends, which donated the space. Barrelhouse singer-pianist Bonni McKeown tutored the children on blues lineage, playing with a band that included blues guitarist Ray Allison, bassist Carl Copeland, saxophonist Abb Locke and drummer Wes Sanders. The kids in the audience were ages 1 to 15.” - Dave Hoekstra
— Chicago Sun-Times
“Bonni has been an inspiration to me since she sent me my first Martin Luther King Day card, since she first emailed "pray for peace, work for justice, boogie for survival", since she left West Virginia to follow her muse and moved to Chicago. She lives honestly. And now, on "Barbershop Blues," she plays and sings her heart, her pure heart, honestly. Her songwriting here inspires another dimension and embodies her aforementioned creed. I thank Bonni for the inspiration that she has unknowingly given me. This woman has Big Ovaries!” - Gaye Adegbalola
— Saffire: Uppity Blueswomen
“Barrelhouse Bonni was voted Best Solo Performer of 2006 by readers of Graffiti, West Virginia's statewide entertainment weekly. Bonni walks the walk, talks the talk and makes the acoustic piano wail, in the gritty, gutsy Chicago style that resonates so well to her local fans.” - JF Rote
— Graffiti WV
“The original "Green Line Blues" is a gorgeous, late-1950s inspired I-IV vamp that finds Larry Taylor trading vocals with pianist and co-writer Bonni McKeown... "They Were in This House is Chicago's real House of Blues.” - Tom Hyslop on Larry Taylor's album
— Blues Revue magazine