While a teenager at Harrow Art School in the mid-1940s, Paul Oliver came close to being expelled for playing blues records to his fellow pupils. When he returned to Harrow as an art teacher he founded the Jazz Purist Society, supplemented his salary by designing sleeves for imported jazz and blues records, and even wielded a mandolin with a skiffle group, the Crawdads. By now he was contributing regular articles and reviews to obscure British music periodicals and amassing the knowledge, understanding and formidable record collection that would soon make him Britain's foremost authority on the blues and a major voice in a growing transatlantic movement that in the 1950s and 1960s called for African American vernacular music to be treated with seriousness and respect as both social history and art. Oliver quit his gig with the Crawdads because, he said, it was futile for whites to try to play the blues: “I had no association with the world of blues singers nationally, racially, environmentally, even by class” (22). Henceforth he adopted the stance of the scholar and educator. His Blues Fell This Morning (1959) only missed being the very first full-length study of the blues due to a printer's strike which allowed Samuel Charters's The Country Blues to pip it onto bookshelves across the Atlantic. His Conversation with the Blues (1965), the result of a long-anticipated visit to the American South, was the first book to use photography and oral history to present what would today be called an “immersive” picture of the world of the blues. And his The Story of the Blues (1969) was the first “complete” history of the blues, as distinct from jazz and other forms of African American music. For generations of black music enthusiasts in Britain and Europe, Oliver was their oracle and their guide. The LPs that accompanied his books, along with his contributions to press, radio and television, did as much to shape taste and opinion as his writings, lending him a stature in Europe that is in some ways comparable with that of Alan Lomax in the United States.

One purpose of Christian O'Connell's Blues, How Do You Do? is simply to recognize and celebrate the significance of Oliver's contribution to blues scholarship and public awareness of the music and its contexts. This it achieves admirably. Another is to analyse and explain that contribution as part of a broader transatlantic discourse on the blues that emerged in the 1950s and gathered pace in the 1960s, just as a new generation of largely white musicians and fans rediscovered the music and remade it in their own image in the form of rock. This too it accomplishes capably and insightfully. As O'Connell points out, Oliver's work in some ways enjoyed an influence and popularity it might otherwise have lacked as a result of the 1960s blues revival and rock explosion. Yet Oliver himself was decidedly sniffy about such popular and modern manifestations of the blues. His writings hewed to an ideal of authenticity that valorized the acoustic, “folk” blues of the agrarian Deep South as captured on the race records of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s beloved of his youth. This was music rooted in the African American peasant experience, insulated from the influence of white America and urban modernity, a record of collective hardship and endurance that could only survive as long as the essentially separate and inward-looking black community that nurtured it survived.

Oliver was thus a romantic purist who saw in his version of the blues a rebuke to the increasingly commercialized, individualistic and empty culture of post-World War II consumer capitalism. Though built upon extensive knowledge of and deep feeling for the music, his work constructs and mythologizes blues history as much as revealing it. In this he is consistent with the American folklorists and ethnomusicologists of his generation who also contributed to an understanding of the blues as a racially defined touchstone of cultural authenticity. In recent years these writers have been taken to task by Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton and Barry Lee Pearson for romanticizing the blues and distorting its history.Footnote ¹ O'Connell similarly deconstructs Oliver's mythologizing inclinations but balances this with a respect for the man's energy, expertise and sheer love for the music and the culture that spawned it that were to have such a profound effect on so many of his readers.