Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Paul Oliver

Paul Oliver Interview Well, I was born in Nottingham, England, but my family actually came from the west of England near Wales. So that was in 1927. If you were born in 1927, that would make you about twelve years old when the war broke out. Do you have any home-front experiences that you can relate? Well, I was in the London suburbs during much of the war, so I was there at the time of the bombing, but it wasn’t as heavy in the suburban areas as it was in the East End of London and Central London. We did have incendiary bombs fall on our house, but we all put them out, and other than that we had no serious problems. Later in the war—from that time on, actually— I was working in harvest camps and later in the war in forestry and ran forestry camps for felling trees and logging. But that was my kind of war effort, because I was still too young to serve, and when I was called up right at the end of the war, I had asthma very badly and they didn’t accept me. I know that you’re an expert in a couple of different fields. Which came first—the music or the architecture? Well, I think probably by a year or so the music came first in the sense that I was already excited by boogie-woogie in the 1930s when I was about ten or eleven. In fact, the rhythm of the trains was so like boogie that I used to travel on the steam trains just to enjoy that—and put my mind in that kind of field. So really I started quite young in that respect. I didn’t understand that to be blues or anything; I just knew it by the popular name of the day, boogie-woogie. So that was really up until about ’42 . . . And around about that time I had to help my father, who was an architect, but he had been seconded to the war office to help with drawing Paul Oliver, Cheltenham, UK, July 2006. Photo Cilla Huggins. 2 paul oliver up and planning the situation from the very heavy bombing in places like Plymouth and Exeter, which destroyed the cities and caused tremendous problems. That involved me to quite an extent in housing of the poor and difficulties in relating that to other architecture around the world. So within a year or so both of them were my obsessions and have been so all my life. Let’s follow the music trail. How was it that you were exposed to boogie-woogie? It started from about 1938 through to the early war years—I suppose off and on for about three or four years, really. After that I got interested in other things, but, you see, the boogie recordings of people like Pete Johnson and Meade “Lux” Lewis and so forth were all entering Britain at that time. And people don’t always realize how many blues records were available in Britain in the 1930s. So it was fairly accessible. Of course we weren’t actually hearing the musicians themselves, but I did eventually in one or two of the areas where the American military settled in. It was records, not radio broadcasts, that you heard? We heard radio too as the years went by, but Alan Lomax came to England and he brought with him a number of Library of Congress recordings, and those were played on the radio as well. But very early on we started having our own bands and groups, and I was interested in documenting the subject as far as I could, but really it was recordings that were the primary source at that time. How did you make the jump from boogie-woogie to the rest of the blues world? Over what time did that happen, and what events led you to expand your enthusiasm? Well, the basic thing was that on one of the trips that I had made to work during the summer vacation—I was still in school, I was working in harvest camps, and one was in the East Anglia area of England—that’s in Suffolk—the American army was just digging in at that time—the American air force, in other words. So it happened to be that their camp was next door to the camp where I was working. And a friend of...