Paul Oliver, "a Briton who wrote some of the earliest and most authoritative histories of one of America's great indigenous musical forms, the blues," died August 15, the New York Times reported. He was 90. Oliver "first heard black American music as a teenager in England during World War II.... The extraordinary sounds sent Mr. Oliver on a lifelong quest as a record collector, field researcher and historian."
After taking a trip through the American South in 1964, interviewing and recording blues singers, Oliver wrote The Story of the Blues. His other books include Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues; Conversation with the Blues; Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition; and Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues.
Brett Bonner, editor of Living Blues magazine, said, "Paul was one of the founders of blues scholarship. He and Sam Charters set the template for everything that followed. They also set the stage for the blues revival of the 1960s. Without them, people like Mississippi John Hurt, Sun House and Skip James would not have had second careers."
Oliver was also an architectural historian, writing extensively "on local forms of architecture around the world." He edited the three-volume Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World and (with Marcel Vellinga & Alexander Bridge) Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World.