This issue of Popular Music is produced in honour of Paul Oliver, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to popular music scholarship.

Paul was a member of the original Editorial Board for Popular Music when it was set up in 1980 and continued to serve as a member of that body, and subsequently of the Editorial Group, until 1990. He was also a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has maintained a keen interest in the organisation, continuing to attend, and speak at, its international conferences. His vision of both the potential and the needs of the Association as a global network lay behind his proposal in 1985 that a project be undertaken to compile a worldwide encyclopedia of popular music, an idea which subsequently bore fruit in EPMOW (The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World). All these achievements are worth celebrating in themselves, but it is Paul's outstanding contribution to scholarship in the area of vernacular – particularly African-American vernacular – music that we wish to honour with this issue.

DH: Perhaps I could begin in the present and ask you how you see the status of the blues today in the black community in the US.

PO: There are a number of black writers who are interested in the arts, but I don't think blues has any significance for the black community as a whole, as gospel still has. Gospel is held together by the religious side, it's a different kind of structure. Rap seems to have taken over, at least as far as the younger generations are concerned.

DH: Do you sense any connection between rap and hip hop and the blues?

PO: There are connections, certainly, but I don't know how significant they are. There are superficial connections – for example the ‘Stackolee’ theme runs through several rap songs – but I'm not sure that is of any depth of significance. But rap songs do provide opportunities for people to express themselves as individuals; otherwise, there isn't a music that does that. As much as anything it's a functional connection, therefore, rather than a stylistic one.

DH: Rap lyrics are more outspoken in many ways than blues lyrics.

Paul Oliver never described himself as an ethnomusicologist but much of his work is strongly ethnomusicological in approach. This article looks at his pioneering research in these terms, re-examines some of his ideas about African retentions in the blues as put forward in his book Savannah Syncopators, discusses critically the reliability of sonic evidence for establishing historical connections between different kinds of music, and concludes that such evidence is acceptable when supported by other kinds of data.

From 1923 to 1931, record companies based in the northern USA stocked their catalogues of Southern vernacular music, particularly African-American blues and white ‘old-time’ music, largely with ‘location recordings’ made in Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas. These recording trips, which are sometimes characterised as speculative, were in fact partly planned, the uncertainty of discovering recordable new talent offset to some extent by the prior booking of artists with whom the companies had already had success. The evidence for this careful planning, however, has been somewhat obscured by the unscheduled discovery, in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, of Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, whose commercial success and stylistic innovations would have enormous influence on country music.

Though federal law in the United States provides for the protection of artistic property, including music, African-American blues musicians, since the appearance of their first commercial records in the 1920s, have generally not received their due. Part of the problem came from the difficulty of squaring the discrete notions of folk composition and artistic property in those early days. But the exploitation of black artists was largely attributable to common practices in the record industry whose effects were multiplied in this case by the near total defencelessness of the victims. Imitations and cover versions led to a veritable despoliation of black talent which has only belatedly received legal compensation and public recognition.

The blues genre is commonly (and not incorrectly) regarded as a key marker of African-American identity and one with ‘deep’ (folk, or ‘down home’) roots. But this status is inadequately understood unless it is placed in a context of inter-racial exchange, in which ‘roots’ are a product of a complex transaction between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. This territory is explored in terms of a thematics of loss, nostalgia and trauma, evident both in blues content and in the historical structure of revival to which the genre has been continually subject. A useful background is the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a nostalgic celebration of nostalgia with a blues/bluegrass inter-racial dimension, and a productive theoretical framework is provided by Lacan's approach to fantasy, loss and nostalgia.

Robert Johnson (1911–1938) is the most venerated of all pre-war blues musicians; the veneration borders on hagiography. Recently published revisionist literature has constructed a sociologically realistic portrayal of a professional musician working among other musicians for a contemporary audience in a specific historical context. This has left unexplained, however, the veneration granted to his music by the audience for his records from the 1960s to today. This paper presents the case that these two bodies of fact can be connected and the one serve as an explanation for the other. As Robert Johnson learned his craft from records and radio, and polished his songs to be recorded, he effectively developed a ‘for-the-record’ aesthetic that made his music sound different to that of his Delta contemporaries and many others who used musical techniques honed in performance for an audience. Decades later, when a ‘for-the-record’ aesthetic was the taken-for-granted standard in popular musical culture, Robert Johnson's records sounded better than those of his contemporaries, and the audience from the 1960s to today has had a reason to think that he and his music were special.

This paper considers references to Oklahoma in blues recordings from 1924 to 1941, and the paradox that, although the reality of life for African-Americans in that state was little different from life in the Deep South, the recordings usually speak of migration to Oklahoma in optimistic terms. The notion that the Indian Nation (a.k.a. ‘the Territory’) had been a refuge for runaway slaves is rebutted, together with the conclusion that optimistic references in the blues preserve this idea as a collective memory. What is being recalled is rather the period between the Civil War and statehood (1907): the former slaves of Native Americans in Oklahoma became tribal members, gaining the civil and property rights accorded to tribes-people, and the black townships movement offered the prospect of autonomy and self-government on the frontier. Two songs which take a negative view of Oklahoma's Jim Crow reality are also considered.

‘Back-Water Blues’, composed by Bessie Smith and recorded by her on 17 February 1927, has long been associated in the popular mind and even by some writers with the great flood of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries that occurred that year. This is historically problematical because that flood began two months after Smith recorded her song. Through an examination of Smith's touring itinerary, the testimony of fellow entertainers who toured with her, newspaper reports, and other documents, it can be shown that the song was composed about a flood of the Cumberland River that struck Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, 1926. The lyrics of the song are interpreted with respect to the events of that flood.

A re-examination of Bessie Smith's first two released blues recordings – ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’ – demonstrates that her interpretative originality and expressive individuality were evident from the start of her recording career in 1923. The micro-components of Bessie's early vocal tendencies are revealed through full transcriptions of her vocal line on each of these recordings combined with detailed description and analysis of the pitch content, the main rhythmic and melodic characteristics, and the melodic-harmonic and text-music relationships. The method demonstrates that, although Bessie's phrases display some similarities with each other, they constantly vary in imaginative ways, matching her with true jazz improvisers.

This study focuses on the five known African-American topical songs dealing with the two hurricanes and ensuing floods that took place in Florida in the summer of 1928. The first is a commercially recorded blues song and the others are unreleased Library of Congress sacred recordings, which are transcribed and analysed here for the first time.

This paper considers the Mike Figgis film Red, White & Blues as a history of blues music in Britain. The film was produced as part of a series celebrating the centenary of the blues, and not unnaturally its British focus begins with the 1950s and 1960s. The paper argues, however, that it is an incomplete history because it fails to consider how the British blues genre and scene developed subsequently. It also argues that the film focuses too much on the memories and performances of the musicians. It fails to consider the industrial context in which any ‘new’ genre can emerge, and pays almost no attention to the role of its consumers, the audiences and fans across the country that were an integral part of its development. The paper suggests that research into that aspect of the British blues scene would complement the various documentary accounts of the music and musicians.

This selective listing concentrates on Paul Oliver's writings on music – therefore, references to books and articles on architecture have been omitted. For reasons of space, Paul's numerous record, book and concert reviews, published in journals such as Jazz Monthly, Audio & Record Review, Melody Maker, and Blues Unlimited, have not been included. For similar reasons, I have chosen not to include the many entries Paul contributed to the following encyclopedias: Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917–1967, ed. A. McCarthy, A. Morgan, M. Harrison and P. Oliver (London, Hanover, 1968); The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (London, Macmillan, 1980); and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. B. Kernfeld (London, Macmillan, 1994). However, I have included entries from The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, as examples of Paul's more recent writing. Also omitted are details of the radio programmes made for the BBC from the mid 1950s to the late 1990s.

Thank you to Paul for his help with this bibliography.