The first in British blues authority Paul Oliver’s series of books documenting the history and analyzing the blues, Blues Fell This Morning was a landmark work in its interpretation of the language, lyrics, and subject matter of blues songs. Oliver examines the texts of 350 songs, mostly from the prewar era. Oliver had been collecting records, studying the lyrics, and writing articles in England while meeting every visiting blues artist he could, but as he noted in retrospect in a 1991 essay, “At this distance in time I wonder at my temerity in writing the book without having been to the States. But the simple fact was that I could not afford to do so.” That would change shortly after the appearance of this book as Oliver made the first of many visits to the American haunts of the blues – see Conversation With the Blues for results of his 1960 trip.
In his “Overseas Blues: Europeans And The Blues” chapter from the compendium Sounds Of The South, Oliver explained: “Getting to know the singers personally, inviting them to our home, and talking to them at length helped me to unravel what many singers on record were singing about. I had been working for a number of years on a book on meaning and content in the blues, and completed it in 1958. Richard Wright, who showed it to a rather surprised Martin Luther King, offered to write an introduction which I valued immensely. A printer’s strike delayed publication for two years, but Blues Fell This Morning was published in London in 1960; a French edition (with the blues translated by Jacques Demêtre) was published as Le Monde du Blues and with the support of Raymond Queneau was awarded the Prix d’Etrangers.”
Blues Fell This Morning remains a valuable study of the blues, especially, as B.A. Botkin wrote in The New York Times Book Review, for Oliver’s “point of view of the outsider who can turn himself inside out culturally . . . he possesses broad sympathies and deep insights lacking in most American writing on the blues.” Ever the student as well as the scholar, Oliver has modified certain views and revised portions of the book in later editions. The book was published as The Meaning of the Blues by Collier in the U.S. in 1963 and has since appeared with the title Oliver preferred, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues.