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. CHRIS STRACHWITZ Arhoolie Records S orting my thoughts about Paul Oliver reminds me, oddly enough, of the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta, where I collected a bit of folklore about Oliver in 1994. I was in Calcutta to sate a curiosity about the adaptation of the guitar in India, and a friend had arranged for me to stay at the mission. One morning over breakfast I met an English gentleman who, aside from myself, was one of the few foreigners there not participating in the celebration of the Vedanta Society's centenary. He was working for OXFAM, and when our conversation turned to music, he casually remarked that he had a friend who had written quite a lot about blues. Oh, I wondered, who might that be? "Paul Oliver," he replied, and added words to the effect of "picks a mean banjo." I was pleasantly stunned to find a friend of the dean of blues scholars feeding me anecdotes in the "mess hall" of a spiritual mission in Calcutta, but such is the nature of life on our small planet. I offer this improbable aside in the spirit of the hearsay which enlivens our vague sense of so many blues legends: "poisoned by a girlfriend ... got religion before he died ... picks a mean banjo." Perhaps a future generation of blues scholars will spend hours listening to private tapes of Oliver's banjo playing with the same intensity his generation spent straining through the hailstorm of surface noise on Paramount 78s. (Beyond this lies God.) Or perhaps, alerted to the possibility, the wary scholar will destroy all auditory evidence, making his vaunted banjo prowess truly a matter of folklore. The news that Paul Oliver allegedly "picks a mean banjo" would have meant nothing to me in Calcutta if not for a series of encounters with Oliver's work over the better part of the prior quarter century. I was in high school when I stumbled onto Columbia's double LP (triple in the U.K.) complement to Oliver's book, The Story of the Blues. The music Oliver chose to illustrate the idiom's evolution was revelatory to an Oklahoma teenager in the halcyon days of funk. I received my baptismal experience of pre-war blues (Charley Patton's voice seared me for life) along with an initial exposure to Johnny Shines, who became my first interview in 1974. In college, I discovered the book which The Story of the Blues album illustrated, a book I continue to value over all other overviews of the blues genre. I also found Oliver's critical works such as Screening the Blues (published in the U.S. as The Blues Tradition), works addressing the music's content and context in thoughtful detail, a parallel to the literary criticism I encountered as an English literature major. A sympathetic professor let me explore my interest in blues in some papers which became my first stabs at writing on the topic. Those efforts were much indebted to Oliver's example, as doubtless was Dr. Marshall's willingness to encourage my interest. I believe he, too, had read Oliver's books. Since then, I've never ceased referring to Oliver's work whenever I've had occasion to write about blues. In recent years I've found his wonderful interview collection, Conversation With the Blues, particularly useful. Anybody who has written about blues with any frequency, be it in an academic or popular context, will no doubt make similar testimony to the inspiration and influence of Paul Oliver's work. It's an impressive oeuvre by any standard, one driven by an evident passion tempered by thoughtful analysis and a penchant for detail and order we Americans deem typically (albeit admirably) British. Prolixity for its own sake was never Oliver's fault; each of his works had something unique to add to an ongoing pursuit of his passion for the blues and related music. Those of us whose discovery of the genre came later were indeed fortunate to have his published work to serve as guideposts. I suspect that in the greater scheme of things, the most we latter day scribes can aspire to is to offer footnotes to the pioneering scholarship of Oliver and the two or three others who were in the forefront of blues scholarship. But I don't say that grudgingly: Oliver's work immeasurably enriched my experience and understanding of the blues. So happy birthday, Paul. Long may your banjo ring! MARK A. HUMPHREY Santa Monica, California It's an honor to get a chance to give | praise to a real trailblazer and standard-setter. The contribution of Paul Oliver's blues research to our knowledge of the blues is incalculable; it's mostly just a question of which of his many excellent books (or recorded documentaries, or articles, or lectures) provided the biggest influence. For a lot of people, The Story of the Blues is still the basic blues history text for its period of coverage. Others will prefer the analyses of blues lyrics. I've always been partial to Conversation With the Blues, which is the blues book I'd most like to see republished. Its special fascination to me is because it's in the words of so many great artists, the preponderance of whom are sadly long gone. No matter what one's personal favorite may be, it's indisputable that Paul Oliver did much to bring a high level of scholarship and academic discipline to blues research, and did so without making it any less interesting or inspiring. Long may he continue to exemplify excellence, and long may his works remain accessible to readers who can still glean much enjoyment, insight and knowledge! DICK SHURMAN Paul Oliver is my stepfather in the blues world; indeed, in 1962, I was happy enough to find a copy of Blues Fell This Morning in a book shop, at a time when I had heard blues enough on the radio to know that it was my thing. Paul's book hooked me for good on the blues and for the rest of my life, leading me to start an ever increasing records, magazine and book collection. My interest in African-American culture grew deeper and deeper from then on, from record to record, from book to book, Bessie Smith (1959), Conversation with the Blues (1965), The Story of the Blues (1969), Savannah Syncopators (1970), Songsters and Saints (1984), each of them a milestone of blues research and a source of delight. Without Paul, I probably would not be presently teaching "The Story of African American Music and Literature" at the University of Liege in my country, since the early 80s! I met Paul and his wife Val several times, and they are among the most kind, interesting, careful people I have ever been in touch with, and Paul is such a gold mine of anecdotes, blues events and scholarly knowledge. It was a great honor to host him during the second International Conference that I organized at the University of Liege in 1991 on the theme "Saints and Sinners," even if he had a hard time with Jon Michael Spencer's criticism. But it stayed on a friendly level, and it was a highlight of the meeting. The following year we were together at another conference held at Sorbonne University in Paris with Professor Michel and Genevieve Fabre, and a couple of weeks ago came out of press the book Saints & Sinners with the proceedings of the Liege 1991 Symposium (including Paul's essay). Thanks for all, Paul. Long life to you and to Val. We wait eagerly for new texts and books of yours. ROBERT SACRÉ Center for American Studies University of Liege, Belgium I t was our honor to have the noted scholar and blues lover Paul Oliver emcee the Second Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1970. He added an enormous quality to the event with his encyclopedic knowledge of the blues, and this was conveyed to the thousands in attendance. We felt that having Paul at the festival added an enormous amount to its success and that it was an interesting juxtaposition to the prior year's host, the inimitable Big Bill Hill. JIM & JOHN FISHEL Paul Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning was the first serious and sustained look at blues lyrics as cultural documents, and it was a model for those of us in the 1960s-Bill Ferris, David Evans and myself-who were making blues the subject of our academic research. His Conversation With the Blues gave blues singers the chance to speak at length in their own voices. I drew liberally on both books for my Early Downhome Blues. His The Story of the Blues was the best popular introduction to the music in its day. Paul is a serious fan and supporter of blues, a writer, researcher, record producer, and so forth, who never was interested in self-promotion, nor was he interested in exploiting the artists and making money from their careers. JEFF TODD TITON I would like to join the many friends and admirers throughout the world to wish Paul Oliver the happiest of 70th birthdays. Like many people who discovered the blues in the early '60s, I was enthralled by Paul's account in his classic Blues Fell This Morning. Not a simple blues history (he was to do the definitive history some years later), it not only told of the music itself but of the social forces that shaped it and the meaning of the lyrics. This was brought home to me even more strongly when I attended a lecture by Paul around 1964 which was part of an exhibition of photographs at the American Embassy. He illustrated his talk with musical excerpts-the most striking, for me, being the then-recent Delmark release by Sleepy John Estes where he sang "Rats in My Kitchen." I was stunned! I had grown up with pop music and tales of teen angst, and here was someone singing with passion and brutal honesty about the situation he, and so many other African Americans found themselves in. It was really an eye opener. Throughout the years I have been impressed by his insight and understanding and his ability to tackle challenging projects such as the possible African origins of the blues (Savannah Syncopators) and the place of early non-blues African-American music (Sinners & Saints). His work is academic but never dry, and throughout, his genuine love and understanding for the music comes through. He may not be as prolific or visible as some authors since his chief line of work is an expert on vernacular architecture. This year he will be finishing an enormous encyclopedia in this field and will then work on revising some of his important blues works. Paul's contributions to our understanding of this music we love are monumental, and I feel privileged to know him and his wife, and invaluable associate, Valerie, for a number of years. Many happy returns, Paul! Nancy and I wish you many more. FRANK SCOTT Roots & Rhythm