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Birthday Greetings to Paul Oliver

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Birthday Greetings to Paul Oliver Long May Your Banjo Ring! Birthday Greetings to Paul Oliver A couple of months ago, British blues writer Alan Balfour sent an e-mail to a private Internet discussion group we're both on, mentioning that the legendary blues scholar, writer and researcher Paul Oliver would celebrate his 70th birthday in June. The idea of a festschrift at least on a blues magazine level, was immediately proposed, and I began calling and e-mailing Paul's colleagues in the blues world to ask for contributions. Almost everyone I contacted said that no matter how busy they were with the pressures of their current workload (and many were professionals with very full plates), all they needed was a deadline and they'd have their offering ready. Several mentioned to me that Oliver had been their inspiration, the reason they had gotten into blues in the first place; still others cited him as the role model, whether personally or simply through his work, that they had tried to emulate in their own careers in the world of blues scholarship. I have no idea how many pages long Paul Oliver's CV is by now, but even a short list of the books he's written would fill an entire page of this magazine. Such seminal works as The Story of the Blues, Savannah Syncopators, Songsters and Saints, Conversation With the Blues, Blues Fell This Morning and more taught many neophyte blues fans the history of the music and musicians, while the magazine articles and liner notes he has written in the past four decades are uncountable. As you'll see by the following tributes, no matter what one may think of his writing style or of any one individual piece of work, his lifetime of contribution to the understanding of the music is an achievement to be proud of, and one that all blues lovers should appreciate for its depth and breadth. MARY KATHERINE ALDIN I no longer remember when the name of Paul Oliver first came to my attention. My interest in African-American music was originally stimulated by Britain's trad boom of the 1960s, and I soon began subscribing to the late and much-lamented Jazz Monthly, which is probably where I first encountered his name. Then came Blues Fell This Morning, which probably first alerted me to the social and cultural context in which this music was created. From the start, the breadth of his interest in the music impressed itself on me. Before that came The Story of the Blues exhibition mounted for the United States Information Service at the U.S. Embassy in London. I was able to steal some time from an academic interview to see this, and it made an indelible impression. I don't think it struck me at the time how extraordinary it was that a United States government agency should be asking an Englishman to mount such a display. Screening the Blues and Songsters and Saints set new standards of scholarship in the field. I finally got to work with Paul when he asked me to contribute to an anthology he was editing under the title Black Music in Britain, thought by its contributors to be the least-publicized book in publishing history, and certainly the least-known of the books appearing under Paul's name. There is no doubt that Paul contributed a great deal to my understanding of the music which has provided me with so much enjoyment and satisfaction. Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943 (as it now is), the revision of which has occupied a large slice of my time over the last five years, is dedicated to Paul, and I am very pleased HOWARD RYE Co-author Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943(4th edition) L ike most people who didn't grow up in the culture that produced it, I became interested in blues through hearing it on record. (I was 14, and the artist was Lazy Lester.) My enthusiasm was of variable intensity for a few years after that, until one day I needed something to read on holiday and borrowed Blues Fell This Morning from the library. I read it at a single sitting (on the night ferry to Belgium, as it happens). Not long after that, The Story of the Blues was published, and I bought it and the accompanying records. This time, not only was I hooked forever by the music itself, but I had found in Paul Oliver the guide I needed to answer my questions (including many I would never have thought of), and to direct me to the artists I should be paying attention to. Above all, I had had the good luck to learn from Paul at the start of an exploration that continues to this day that an understanding of both text and context are essential in studying - and, I believe, in fully appreciating - the blues. At a time when the blues has, perhaps, never been more widely known or less widely understood, Paul Oliver's writing reminds us of the importance of the social and cultural roots of the music in Africa and the United States, and of the respect we owe to the musicians who developed it. Not to try to understand those roots is to fail to show that respect. After some years of being a fan of the music, I began to be allowed by record companies and journals to try to convey my own thoughts and ideas about the blues in print. After some years of doing that, I eventually got to meet my hero, and I would like to say for the record that Paul is a person who considers a person's opinions and ideas about blues on the basis of what is said, not of who is saying it or what their track record may be; to reclaim an old phrase from its cliche status, he is a gentleman and a scholar. The most valuable book on my shelves is the revised Blues Fell This Morning, with an inscription from the author thanking me for helping with the transcriptions. Thank you for asking me, Paul, and thanks for keeping me awake on that ferry to Belgium all those years ago. CHRIS SMITH Shetland, U.K T he sanitized version of American history I was taught at school completely failed to prepare me for the jolt my sensibilities were to have one fall afternoon in 1962 when I heard Blues in the Mississippi Night being played at a friend's house by his father. We had gone there to have an afternoon of listening to the latest U.K. hits. I ended up playing Blues in the Mississippi Night time and time again -much to my friend's disgust. To keep the peace, his father, who I later understood was a jazz fan, gave me the record suggesting I kept it to play at home. An impressionable teenager perhaps, but as Chris Smith has noted elsewhere, it's a record to "make you both ashamed and enthralled to be listening", whatever your age. From there began a voyage of discovery which continued via a second hand copy of the album Blues Fell This Morning - Rare Recordings of Southern Blues Singers, the reverse of which began, "One of the richest folk music forms to develop in the Western World during the present century, the blues of the Negroes of the Southern United States, has been a major influence on both jazz and popular song," and quoting names like Barbecue Bob, Peg Leg Howell, Barefoot Bill and Bukka White. There was also an advertisement for a book of the same title which was said to contain "three hundred and fifty quotations from recorded blues." That I just had to have. The book took me beyond the strange music on the record and pointed me in the direction of an American people and culture of which I knew precious little and consequently shamed me into discovering more. My leisure reading of whodunits gave way to Lay My Burden Down, Black Boy, Myth of the Negro Past and anything else listed in the bibliography that I could locate in libraries. However, Blues Fell This Morning was responsible for my learning about American history in general, and black history in particular, more than ever I got from school - and it was fun too. It might sound clichéd, but Paul Oliver did change the direction of my life, as I'm sure he did for others of a later generation with The Story of the Blues and will continue to do so for this generation with the book's revision and imminent publication. Thirty-eight years ago Richard Wright, in his introduction to Blues Fell This Morning, probably paid the most apt tribute of all to Paul's endeavors: "Paul Oliver is drenched in his subject; his frame of reference is as accurate and as concrete as though he himself had been born in the environment of the blues." ALAN BALFOUR Contributor, Blues & Rhythm Paul Oliver is the one who really got ~me started, and certainly taught me everything I know, on that first field recording trip back in 1960-it was unforgettable! He was so together and had everything documented down to a T. I met him and his wife Valerie in Memphis, and we drove down through Mississippi and Louisiana, then back through Texas. I bought so many 78s on that trip that the crummy old car I was driving wouldn't haul them up hills; we ended up having to hire a trailer to carry the 78s! Happy Birthday to Paul Oliver, and many, many more, and I hope he keeps enjoying his life and doing the things he loves to do with all the passion he has and continues to have and puts into these wonderful efforts of his.
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