Larry Hill Taylor: Stepson of the Blues: Bio

Larry Hill Taylor - Spirit of the Blues

 It took Chicago blues singer and drummer Larry Hill Taylor’s harrowing 50-some year voyage through gangs, prison and drugs to clarify his life purpose: to instill his musical heritage into the next generation.

Larry grew up in North Lawndale on the city’s West Side, surrounded by the world’s greatest musicians, from Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James to Magic Sam and Tyrone Davis. His parents came from Mississippi. His mother Vera Taylor wrote and sang her own blues songs, and his stepfather, VeeJay recording artist Eddie Taylor, built the famous lump and boogie rhythms that made Jimmy Reed a star.

 Larry got his early drum coaching from Cassell Burrows of Howlin’ Wolf’s band. He toured Europe with Willie Dixon’s New Generation of Chicago Blues in 1977.  Since then, Larry has played on stage locally, nationally and internationally with blues and soul greats like Albert Collins, Otis Clay, Big Moose Walker, Junior Wells, Hubert Sumlin, and A.C. Reed. 

 As he sings and drums, Larry feels the rhythm and the spirit of the blues ancestors and communicates it among his West Side bandmates on stage.  He sometimes appears in a Taylor Family act with brother Eddie Taylor Jr. on guitar, Tim Taylor drums; singer Demetria Taylor and their two other singing sisters Edna and Brenda.

 He has played on several Delmark and Wolf records plus his own CD, They Were in This House, which Wolf Records reissued in 2011. He aims to pass his music and his life story on to new generations, through both his music and his autobiography, Stepson of the Blues: A Chicago Song of Survival.

Bonni McKeown - Co-Author (as told to)

Bonni McKeown, lifelong writer, activist, and blues piano player, www.barrelhousebonni.com is Larry’s as-told-to co-author in Stepson of the Blues. A West Virginian who came to the Windy City to learn the blues, she is the author of one previous biography of a West Virginia conscientious objector who served in Vietnam as a medic. Peaceful Patriot: The Story of Tom Bennett was published by Mountain State Press 1980 and reissued by her own Peaceful Patriot Press, http://peacefulpatriotpress.blogspot.com ,which has also published Stepson. Bonni profiled southern West Virginia’s under-promoted African American musicians in 2007 for Metro Valley magazine in Charleston, the state’s capital, and wrote a cover story about Chicago’s West Side blues men and women in 2006 for Detroit’s Big City Rhythm & Blues Magazine.

 Bonni has founded a traveling educational workshop, Chicago School of Blues, www.chicagoschoolofblues.org which reconnects generations by bringing Chicago blues musicians to classrooms.