The headline achievements in Paul Oliver's extraordinary career as a blues scholar are easy enough to list. After all, the body of work he produced in this field is generally accepted as the single most influential contribution; his writings and talks probably introduced more people to blues music, created more fans and inspired more researchers than anyone else's; he pioneered the use of commercial blues recordings as key material for blues scholarship; he played a major role in establishing what became the dominant narrative driving understandings of blues history and of its meanings; and, bringing together textual analysis, archival, documentary and oral history, and anthropology (including fieldwork), he established a persuasive model of interdisciplinary work – the sort of model that most popular music scholars have seen as essential in their field.

All this has been said often enough – for example, in this journal's own tribute to Paul to mark the occasion of his 80th birthday (Popular Music, 26/1 [2007]), as well as in the many obituaries – and it merits repeating, often. Here, though, I want to write something with a more personal slant. Despite my huge respect for Paul's work, and affection for the man, it would be false to attempt to disguise the fact that our approaches to blues, and to popular music studies more generally, diverged in several ways. While eulogies from whatever source are entirely appropriate, a tribute from a ‘critical friend’ is surely particularly telling. The wry grin from the subject that I visualise at this point suggests to me that he would not disagree.

I came to blues as a student in the early 1960s via jazz and then R'n‘B – a not unfamiliar story. When the moment arrived to contemplate doctoral study – which I was determined would be in popular music – an obvious focus seemed to me to be the role of blues in the development of pop: from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, its centrality seemed clear; and besides, the music knocked me out. At that point I'm pretty sure I had never heard of Paul Oliver – a measure of the naivety of my enthusiasm (if it had been longer established, I would have discovered the many articles he had contributed to jazz journals during the 1950s). This ignorance didn't last long. I soon discovered Blues Fell This Morning (1960) and Conversation with the Blues (1965), which were eye-opening, the first for its acute insights into ways in which the meanings of blues lyrics were embedded in the fabric of African American life, the second for its revelations through interviews with singers of the emotional significance of the music to them – its authenticity. At the same time, though, I was discovering other material, and some of it was pointing me in different directions. While Paul seemed to portray a very bounded and disappearing culture – a ‘folk past’ – and had at best mixed feelings about both the white-driven blues ‘revival’ and the commercialisation of black music, I was interested in the relationship between blues and (mainly white) pop music and was becoming convinced that this could only be understood in the context of a very long history of inter-racial and inter-cultural encounter. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), though a black nationalist, took very much this line in his Blues People (1963): African American music, while absolutely specific, was – precisely and importantly – an American music; and Ralph Ellison, expanding on the message of his wonderful novel, Invisible Man (1953), made a similar point in Shadow and Act (1967). Then there was Charles Keil's Urban Blues (1966) which, far from lamenting the decline of ‘down-home’ traditions, set its ethnomusicological sights on the present, on the big city, on the glitzy modern styles of B. B. King, Bobby Bland and Ray Charles. This was the world of Soul music, Civil Rights and Black Power, which seemed to me exactly where the blues lineage was headed.

Notoriously, Keil caricatured a certain approach to the quest for ‘genuine’ blues singers as the ‘moldy fig mentality’. To qualify, discoveries had to be old, toothless, blind, obscure, with a small output and connections to one of the legendary figures in the Deep South past. Paul was no ‘moldy fig’. His first book was a biography (the first) of Bessie Smith, who enjoyed huge commercial success in the 1920s and a colourful show-biz life-style. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable tinge of nostalgia in the writing – a sense that the best of the vernacular wonder that was blues had gone and the culture was fading under pressure from mass entertainment. Even if the otherness of blues was an important part of what appealed to pop musicians and to white adolescents in general, I wanted to ask if there wasn't a more differentiated, hybridising music culture than was being presented here, and if it wasn't possible for blues to mutate and to maintain an aesthetic and cultural value even within the belly of the commercial beast.

Some of these doubts were assuaged by The Story of the Blues (1969) and Savannah Syncopators (1970). In the first of these, it's true, the same overall narrative framework, with its decline-and-fall element, is still present, but this is significantly qualified by new emphases on geographical differentiation, on the importance of migration (with a particular focus on the northern city ghettos) and on the broader, often hybrid musical field within which blues developed. The wonderful collection of images, drawn from many different types of source, helps create this sense of a more complicated history. In addition, some musicians who had previously been ignored – T-Bone Walker, Ray Charles, Buddy Guy – now make an appearance. Savannah Syncopators had a terrific appeal to me. Influenced by reading the anthropologist, Melville Herskovits, I had myself tried to point to the importance of the likely retentions of African traits in African American music, including blues. Paul now offered a persuasive and innovative theory built on inter-disciplinary research: fieldwork in Ghana, historical data and linguistic and musical analysis. I wasn't qualified then, and am not now, to give an authoritative assessment of the theory – but I trust John Baily when he cites in support the judgement of his fellow ethnomusicologist, Gerhard Kubik, whose expertise in this area is unrivalled (in Popular Music, 26/1, p. 21). Over a decade later, in 1984, the sense produced by these two books of a steadily broadening vision in Paul's work on blues was confirmed, and extended again, by Songsters and Saints, a pioneering study, drawing on early 20th-century recordings, of African American religious music on the one hand, and the repertoires of black ‘songsters’, which often included blues but many other song genres as well, on the other. The overall picture of the career that emerges (and continues after the 1980s) is of a capacity to change, to re-assess, to move on, that offers an exemplary model for scholars.

Underpinning this trajectory, there is, I believe, a distinct theory of culture. However, it is never really articulated as theory. This points to the biggest divergence of all between Paul and myself. Like many coming into popular music studies in the 1960s and after, I was convinced of the need to theorise what I was doing, and was indeed captivated by theory (perhaps too much). Paul, in contrast, insisted on the primacy of the material; he wanted to rescue it and rub our noses (or rather our ears) in it, and he was sceptical about ‘theory’. I think we each knew that we would never agree on this.

If I now try to balance the critical edge in my remarks with (in addition to the sheer bulk of the achievements listed in my opening paragraph) a summary of those dimensions of Paul's work that I personally most value, it's actually his ‘empiricism’ that comes first. However problematic one might consider this position to be, reminders of the irreducibility of the concrete material, of the stuff of what Marx liked to call ‘real life’, are always salutary. Moreover, in a strange way, moves within cultural theory itself – first with post-structuralism, where ‘stuff’ always evades the rule of the signifier, and even more with the Heideggerian turn (from Lacan to Badiou) – result, ironically, in the sense of a doubling back to an encounter with the sheer ‘thisness’ of particular experience. A second point of great value arises, again ironically, from the folk model with which Paul worked. Whatever its limitations, the focus on vernacular creativity, on what people make for and by themselves, shines ever more brightly as the seemingly unstoppable forces of commodification continue to simultaneously tighten and expand their grip. If in art nothing ever truly dies, we can be confident that the ‘archeology’ of blues for which Paul strove will continue to have an active effect. This leads me to a third point. For Paul, as for me (and indeed for all popular music scholars), the vernacular is also necessarily the subaltern; and validating the culture of the subaltern necessarily involves, in the case of black music, an anti-racist position. It is impossible to over-emphasise the strength of this element within Paul's scholarly life, and in the age of Trump and Black Lives Matter, it could hardly be more significant. At the same time, any white, middle-class scholar engaging with the subaltern, especially the black subaltern, and seeking to enter and interpret that world, is inevitably entering a relationship that unsettles all theoretical assumptions, and I believe that Paul thought about and worried away at this issue at least as much as I did.

Paul was of a somewhat older generation than most of the early proponents of popular music studies and, as I have tried to suggest, his perspective differed in some ways from approaches that became prevalent. Perhaps it's the obvious enduring value of those deeply humane principles that I have just summarised which helps to explain why, nevertheless, he could commit himself so enthusiastically to the emergent institutions and activities of this new area of work. He was a founding and active member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and, coming closer to home, a founding board member of this journal and subsequently a member of the Editorial Group. His wise and thoughtful editorial contributions were as valued as the pieces he published with us. He will be greatly missed.