Bonnie G. Rowe

Bonnie G. Rowe did not seem to mind much when people thought he was a woman because his given name was Bonnie. For 87 years he corrected people and never gave much thought to using his middle name of Gordon. “Mother and father wanted me to be known as Bonnie, so that is it” he once said. “All I knew was music and that is all I ever wanted to do” he recalled in his NAMM Oral History interview. He opened the Rowe’s Music retail shop, a publishing company, which offered a number of his own songs, and a school created to teach large classes of accordion students. His undying passion for music made him a welcome sight at NAMM shows over the years as Bonnie always had a good story to tell. His first NAMM Oral History interview was completed in 2004 with a follow up in July 2008.