Setting up their equipment in hotel rooms in major cities, these emissaries from companies such as Victor, Paramount, Blue Bird, and Okeh recorded performances by artists who may have been local or brought from many miles away. In the 1920s, record companies discovered that there was a market for recordings of black musicians and began to comb the South for artists who had the potential to sell records. Oliver’s first lecture concentrated on commercial recordings made in the South between 19. Nevertheless, a significant number of collectors overcame those difficulties, motivated by aesthetic or commercial considerations, or both. As a result, making field recordings, which meant essentially bringing the recording studio to the performer, could be logistically challenging. Recording technology was barely past its infancy at the time, and the equipment required to make a decent recording of even a single performer accompanying himself on guitar weighed more than a ton and had to be transported by truck. In his talks, collectively titled “Proto Blues: Secular Black Music Recorded in the Field,” Oliver focused not only on the music that emerged in the early 20th century from the work camps, prison farms, juke joints, and vaudeville shows of the American South, but also on the circumstances under which that music was recorded. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Oliver shared some of his insights into this rich, uniquely American music earlier this month, when he delivered the Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures, an annual series sponsored by the W.E.B.
In addition to being an expert on the blues and other African-American musical forms, he is also one of the world’s foremost authorities on vernacular architecture and is the editor of the four-volume “Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World.” His books on the blues include “Blues Fell This Morning,” “Conversations with the Blues,” “Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records,” and “The Story of the Blues.” His fascination led him on a 60-year quest that has included numerous field trips through the American South interviewing, recording, and photographing blues musicians.īorn in 1927, Oliver is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the University of Exeter, and Oxford Brookes University. Oliver was enthralled by the rhythm and drive of the music and the spontaneous interweaving of harmonies, and wanted to hear more. Paul Oliver, probably the world’s foremost scholar of the blues, first heard African-American vernacular music during World War II when a friend brought him to listen to black servicemen stationed in England singing work songs they had brought with them from the fields and lumber camps of the Deep South.
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