Larry Hill Taylor: Stepson of the Blues: Authors

Larry Hill Taylor - Author, Singer and Drummer

Larry Hill Taylor, blues singer and drummer, grew up in poor, sometimes violent North Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago, surrounded by family conflict, gangs, drugs, prison, and some of the greatest music in the world including that of his mother, Vera Taylor, a blues singer; and stepfather Eddie Taylor, guitarist.

Since the late 1970s, Larry has played on stage locally, nationally and internationally with many of the blues and soul greats. After learning from blues masters like Cassell Burrow and S.P. Leary, Howlin’ Wolf’s drummers, Larry toured Europe in 1977 with Willie Dixon’s New Generation of Chicago Blues. He drummed and sang professionally for 30 years behind blues and soul stars like Luther Allison, Albert Collins, Carey and Lurie Bell, Otis Clay, Honeyboy Edwards, Big Walter Horton, John Lee Hooker, Robert Lockwood Jr., Jimmy Rogers, and A.C. Reed. He played on several Delmark and Wolf records with his brother Eddie Taylor Jr and with his uncles Eddie and Jimmy Burns, with saxman AC Reed and guitarist Johnny B Moore. He is featured on Wolf Records’ Chicago Best of West and South Side Singers, Vol. I & II.

In 2004 Larry Taylor gathered some talented West Siders and launched his own band with his own album, the CD They Were in This House. He has played at the Chicago Blues Festival 2005 and 2008, and many Chicago clubs; at the Wang Dang Doodle fest in Vicksburg MS 2006; DC Blues Society 20th anniversary 2007; festivals, concerts and educational programs around Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia from 2005-2010. His shows have highlighted talented, under-recognized Chicago blues guitarists and bass players such as Killer Ray Allison, Vernon and Joe Harrington, Osee Anderson and Willie Davis. Now with his autobiography Stepson of the Blues: A Chicago Song of Survival, He aims to pass his music and his life story on to new generations.

Bonni McKeown - Co-Author (as told to)

Bonni McKeown, lifelong writer, activist, and blues piano player, is Larry’s as-told-to co-author. 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 (Mountain State Press 1980). She profiled southern West Virginia’s under-promoted African American musicians in 2007 for Metro Valley magazine in Charleston, the state’s capital. She wrote a cover story about Chicago’s West Side blues men and women in 2006 for Detroit’s Big City Rhythm & Blues Magazine.