Paul Oliver was one of my earliest mentors. I was in my mid-teens when I wrote to him about my desire to document blues and jazz and he replied in generous terms.
He was encouraging, friendly and helpful at a time when women were almost universally regarded with disdain in the jazz world. We met for the first time in 1958, outside the Royal Festival Hall, where he photographed me and my brother with the bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, using my mother’s Box Brownie camera.
When he and his wife, Valerie. embarked on their historic American field trip, I contributed a small amount to the supporting fund; later he told me about encountering segregation in the south and how, in Mississippi, because of the presence of a white woman, the couple were forced to travel separately in order to rendezvous with black musicians in the fields after nightfall.
Paul was associated with two greats of African-American literature. In 1960 Richard Wright, the author of the books Black Boy and Native Son, contributed an introduction to his Blues Fell This Morning, observing that Paul “wrote as if he’d bummed around the Black Belt for years”.
Four years later, to Paul’s delight, his Story of the Blues exhibition at the US embassy in London was attended by Langston Hughes, the “poet of Afro-America”.