Paul Oliver (1920–2017)

Paul Oliver, a prolific writer on blues music, has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary.

As a teenager, I borrowed Oliver’s The Story of the Blues (1969) from the library, again and again. The first blues record I ever bought: the Columbia double-album The Story of the Blues (1969), designed to accompany the book. A world opened.

I learned from the Times obituary that Oliver was a distinguished architectural historian. Who knew? (Not me.) Blues was what a colleague of mine would call Oliver’s sidebar life.