ONE of the world’s leading authorities on the blues and a scholar of vernacular architecture has died in Shipton-under-Wychwood aged 90.

Paul Hereford Oliver, who taught at Oxford Brookes University, devoted much of his life to the study of dwellings and settlements.

One of his greatest achievements was his editing of the 2,384-page Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, which won the Sir Bannister Fletcher Award for Art and Architecture in 1998.

In 2003 Paul was made an MBE in recognition of his contribution to architectural education.

He was also an avid lover of African American music and produced groundbreaking research in the field – opening the eyes of many to a music that had often remained overlooked.

After travelling through the United States and interviewing blues singers, he wrote The Story of the Blues – the first comprehensive history of the genre.

Paul Hereford Oliver was born in Nottingham on May 25, 1927, son of the architect W?R?N Oliver and his wife Dorothy.

He studied at Longfield Primary School and then Harrow County Boy’s School.

It was as a teenager that he had his first encounter with the blues when, in 1942, while gathering crops in Suffolk to help the war effort, a friend said to him: “I’m going to take you to hear something you won’t forget”.

The two boys went to went to watch from afar as black American soldiers set up a military base.

“He took me down to a kind of hedge between the two farms, and there was this extraordinary crying and yelling,” Mr. Oliver told earlyblues.com in 2009.

Mr Oliver told his friend he had no idea what the music the soldiers were singing was, to which his friend replied: “You’re listening to blues.”

The passion for blues would continue throughout Mr Oliver's life.

As an adult, he won a grant from the US State Department and received financing from the BBC to travel to America and record blues artists.

His journey led to an exhibition, which became the starting point for The Story of the Blues, which traced the development of the music up to the 1960s.

He edited interviews from his trip for Conversation With the Blues.

His work as an architectural historian began to make headway at about the same time.

He studied at the University of London, where he graduated with a degree in art-history in 1955, and would go on to take up the post of drawing master at the city's Architectural Association School.

Mr Oliver left in 1973 to lead the art and design department at Dartington College of Arts. In 1978 he joined the architecture department at Oxford Polytechnic, which in 1992 was renamed Oxford Brookes.

Mr Oliver's wife Val died in 2002, and there were no children from the marriage.