About Bonni McKeown
Born in Philadelphia to parents whose family business sank roots in West Virginia 90 years ago, I could never seem to cut my ties to either the city or the country. In the face of a divided America, I’m now called to the mission of “city-country bridge for love and truth.” Stories and music, well-made, strike emotional chords everywhere and bring people together.
The roots of American popular music, according to many musicologists, come from Celtic and African cultures—both with raw emotional power that tends to get diluted in commercial settings. My role in helping present blues music is to elevate local culture and individual expression. In business terms it’s called “asset based development”, such as you find in farmers markets and tourism based on local nature and history.
My English professor at WVU, Dr Patrick Gainer, led the way in reviving Appalachian oldtime music around the state. When I went to Chicago to study and play “the real” blues, I discovered the art form was being overrun by “mainstream” (i.e. White rock music modes) and a plantation-like system that starves Black musicians. With my partner, West Side bluesman Larry Taylor, I aimed to follow Dr. Gainer’s example and help revive the music for the benefit of the communities and musicians that created it—my own reparations program. Using city grants and nonprofit sponsors that allow us to pay musicians respectfully, we have offered all-ages, free concerts in West Side neighborhoods. In community discussions, and in the film The Rhythm and the Blues, I have emphasized the local cultural value of blues music and encouraged new generations to carry it on.
In this politically polarized age, I now focus my own creative writing on fiction rather than journalism. Awareness of our own human emotions, more than presentations of facts, can help us leave behind eras of brutality and transform to higher levels of cooperative human existence.
Biography
I, Bonni V. McKeown graduated in 1971 in journalism from West Virginia University, where I met fellow student Tom Bennett, whose biography I later wrote, Peaceful Patriot, first published in 1980 by Mountain State Press. During the 1970s-80s, I worked as a reporter on daily newspapers in Danbury, Connecticut; Pulaski, Virginia, and in Beckley and Charleston, WV. My poems appeared in Wild Sweet Notes, a 2005 West Virginia anthology, and two of my history pieces in the 2006 West Virginia Encyclopedia. In Hampshire County, WV I worked as land, farm and history manager and co-authored a 2002 history of historic buildings for the Capon Springs and Farms resort.
In the 2000s I played folk and blues piano, wrote for Chicago community news outlets, edited fiction by local writers, and co-authored Stepson of the Blues, autobiography of West Side bluesman Larry Taylor. I co-wrote and co-produced a feature film based on Taylor’s family story, The Rhythm and the Blues, in production by Darryl Pitts in 2024. My novel-in-progress, Delta Song, portrays a bluesman’s spiritual life.
An organic gardener and lifelong activist for passenger trains, racial justice and livable communities, I am blessed with a talented daughter, also a WVU graduate, and four amazing grandchildren. Having spent most of the last 20 years in Chicago, I am, like most West Virginians, looking for country roads (not billion-dollar new four-lanes, however) to take me home more frequently.
[email protected]
Other Creative Skills
Music: Ethnic
