Paul Oliver

Paul Hereford Oliver MBE (25 May 1927 – 15 August 2017) was a British architectural historian and writer on the blues and other forms of African-American music. He "was equally distinguished in both fields, although it is likely that aficionados of one of his specialties were not aware of his expertise in the other." He wrote some of the first scholarly studies of blues music, and his commentary and research have been influential.

Oliver was a leading authority on the blues and gospel music, described in the New York Times as "a scrupulous researcher with a fluent writing style, [who] opened the eyes of readers in Britain and the United States to a musical form that had been overlooked and often belittled." He published his first article in Jazz Journal in 1951. His first book on the blues, a biography of Bessie Smith, was published in 1959, followed by Blues Fell this Morning: The Meaning of the Blues in 1960. The latter book was " one of the first efforts to examine closely the music’s language and subject matter." (Read more at Wikipedia

Links to Peel
During the British blues boom of the late 1960s, Paul Oliver was the leading authority on the music. He appeared as a guest on Peel's Night Ride, appeared alongside Peel at blues festivals and broadcast frequently on the BBC. He published his classic The Story Of The Blues in 1969 and edited a series of "Blues Paperbacks", including a volume on Charley Patton by Peel favourite and blues scholar John Fahey. Many of these books were accompanied by reissue compilation LPs, and Peel played tracks from them on his shows.

But an unintended side-effect of Paul Oliver's work was to create a kind of blues purism, whose followers dismissed other kinds of black music like soul and reggae as shallow and commercial. Although Peel was a lifelong blues fan, he never shared this point of view. Paul Oliver continued to write and broadcast (in addition to his main career as an architectural historian) but Peel doesn't seem to have any contact with him after the early 1970s.

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