For decades after the publication of his first book on the blues, Paul Oliver remained the blues world’s foremost author, still writing and lecturing on the blues in his eighties. Oliver’s works have been based not only on his incisive analyses of records but on extensive field work in the United States and Africa and interviews with blues artists both famous and obscure. Three of his books, The Story of The Blues (Northeastern, 1969), Conversation With the Blues (Horizon Press, 1969), and Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (Cambridge University Press, 1960), are already in the Blues Hall of Fame as Classics of Blues Literature. Although books, records, and magazines from England have been inducted, Oliver, who was born in Nottingham, England, on May 25, 1927, becomes the first individual from Britain elected to the Hall of Fame. Oliver first heard the blues at a U.S. air base in England during World War II, and began writing articles in 1952. Oliver was a professor of architecture and a distinguished author in that field as well. Oliver passed away at the age of 90 on August 15, 2017.
