Bonnie Koloc

Folk singer and songwriter Bonnie Koloc occupied a prominent place in Chicago’s songwriting community throughout the 1970s, when she cut two albums for the major Epic imprint near the close of that decade. She entered the world on February 6, 1946, and spent her childhood on the fringes of Waterloo, Iowa, amid challenging conditions. Her father earned a modest wage at a John Deere tractor plant, and her parents ended their marriage the year she turned 12. Speaking to The Chicago Tribune in 1988 she recalled, “I wore a lot of hand-me-downs, and I thought that people who had indoor johns must be rich.” Singing had already captivated her by the age of three. While enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa she struggled academically as club dates began to multiply, and she left school in 1968, heading for Chicago in hopes of establishing herself within the city’s expanding folk circuit. She became a regular at the Earl of Old Town, matching the draw of John Prine and Steve Goodman during the early years of the decade. Her songwriting bore the imprint of jazz and blues phrasing; the Ed Holstein piece “Jazzman” turned into one of her signature numbers, and she frequently performed at his venue, Holstein’s. Ovation Records signed her and issued After All This Time in 1971. Five additional Ovation releases followed, generating sufficient momentum for a move to Epic, which put out Close-Up in 1976 and Wild and Recluse in 1978. She paused her recording career in the early 1980s to pursue visual art, then resurfaced on Flying Fish with With You on My Side in 1987. Beginnings appeared in 2010, assembling live documents from some of her initial Chicago and downstate Illinois appearances. By the late 2010s she resided in Iowa, where she taught art, yet continued to perform regularly in Chicago, retaining a loyal following there. Recognition of her contributions to the local folk community has been hampered by the scarcity of CD reissues for much of her catalog and by its unavailability on major streaming platforms.