Bonnie Koloc

Who is Bonnie Koloc?

Bonnie Koloc is an American folk music singer-songwriter, actress, and artist who was considered one of the three main Illinois-based folk singers in the 1970s, along with Steve Goodman and John Prine forming the "trinity of the Chicago folk scene.". Koloc was the least successful of the three, but her material did sell modestly.

Koloc was born to a working-class family: "I guess you could say we were poor; we lived in a cement block house outside the city limits of Waterloo, IA, and my dad worked in the John Deere factory. Money was very tight. I wore a lot of hand-me-downs, and I thought that people who had indoor johns must be rich. I had a really unstable childhood, because my parents were divorced when I was 12, and there was a lot of chaos. I spent a lot of time during my high school years trying to get myself together from my childhood."

The first of her family to attend college, she enrolled in the University of Northern Iowa, first majoring in drama, then art, paying her way by singing, but earning poor grades. She abandoned her studies to go to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the influential Earl of Old Town.

She had a minor hit with "Roll Me On the Water" from the 1974 album You're Gonna Love Yourself in the Morning, but never achieved the national recognition many predicted for her.