Earlier this year David Horn interviewed Paul at length looking back as well as forward. Here's their exchange with regard to Oliver's current project:
David Horn: You say some things might have been forgotten. Not just ignored or even never done, but forgotten.
Paul Oliver: Yes, I used the word deliberately. In other words it isn't that writers have never noticed something, but that it's been noticed and been forgotten. I'm doing this book at the moment. I've been working on it for years, very slowly, partly because there have been other things, and partly because getting the material together is very difficult. The book is called Blues the World Forgot. It's a Ma Rainey title from 1927 - funnily enough it's the only one in which she doesn't sing; she talks all the way through! - but the point about it is that I'm trying to draw attention to some aspects of the music which have been overlooked and need not have been. To a large extent the history has been skewed, in a way. I'm interested in what the music meant to the people at the time, rather than to us now. So I'm trying to focus on that. But because these aspects have been ignored, research is extremely difficult. The generations have passed on and finding references and so on is proving very hard.
DH: Your book Songsters and Saints, which was published in 1984, was another attempt to put the record straight, in a way, and to give a more accurate reflection of what the music was actually like than to cherry pick the bits that appeal more to people today.
PO: I was also trying to show the kind of formative elements. Within the space of ten years of the birth date there is an extraordinary change. For the generation that was only a few years older, the songster generation, blues for them was another song type. What was interesting to me was their amazing diversity, and in a way some of that got lost in the development of blues. I'm not sure it's necessarily because of the motivation of the singers, I suspect it's because of increasing commercial interests. The book required a great deal of research. I greatly enjoyed doing it, but nobody had really transcribed any of the recorded sermons, for example, and I think they're intensely interesting, I hoped that that would inspire other attempts, but as far as I know it hasn't. Bruce Rosenberg did a study of one particular preacher [1970], and there have been some other things, but nobody has really looked at the spectrum, or taken someone like Reverend Gates and examined his whole corpus. That work just hasn't been done. But all this represents an enormous amount of recorded material. That also applies to the women singers.
DH: What reasons do you think exist for this tendency to plough the same furrows and ignore new ones that have been suggested?
PO: This will be part of the point of the Introduction to Blues the World Forgot. I'll be trying to show what I think has happened. Encapsulated, it's that the adulation for Robert Johnson, the perception of Robert Johnson as being the grandfather of rock, has led to a peculiar kind of history, which Robert Palmer's Deep Blues [1981] was the first to articulate, which channels everything from Mississippi through a very narrow group of people. It's one way of looking at it but it's not an accurate picture of the music that was contemporary with Robert Johnson when he was recording. The 1930s singers on the East Coast are almost completely forgotten. And Robert Johnson made a remarkably small number of records, whereas someone like Tampa Red made an incredible number - about 360 titles. He wouldn't have been making that number if he wasn't popular. I feel in a way it has all been skewed to be an argument or a justification for rock. Obviously it has its own justification, I don't mean that it hasn't. But this justifies its lineage.
DH: Gives it a kind of authenticity.
PO: Yes, and I feel that's altogether too limited.