Here's the obituary on Bruce that was presumably written by Ed Cray and
posted to Ballad-L. I'm quite sure Ed meant Jack *Campin*.
I didn't know Bruce very well. I'd met him a couple of times and he seemed
a bit shy. His knowledge of music was astounding, as was his willingness
to share it with others.
Jeri
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William Bruce Olson, retired physical chemist and longtime song and
ballad scholar, died Friday afternoon, October 31, at Shady Grove Adventist
Hospital, Gaithersburg, Maryland. He was 73.
The cause of death was listed as severe pancreatitis, Olson's son,
Kenneth, said. His father, however, also suffered from kidney failure and
severe emphysema.
Olson -- who preferred to be known by his middle name -- entered the
hospital to treat breathing problems with a continuous oxygen supply.
Fatalistic, and complaining too of severe pains in his lower back, he told
a friend he was not sure he would survive.
Olson spent his professional career at the National Bureau of Standards
-- now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Hired as a
physical chemist -- in that subject he earned his doctorate -- Olson became
expert in both infra-red and molecular spectroscopy as tools for testing
materiels.
Caught up in the folk song revival of the 1950s, Olson became
interested not in performing but in researching the songs others were
singing. Over time, he delved into the history of particular songs, and
through that began to catalogue the all but untouched body of 16th, 17th
and 18th Century song and music collections. A hobby first became a
passion and then a consuming avocation, he explained to a friend.
Olson came to take special pleasure in the access he earned to
libraries devoted to what he deemed as serious scholarship, particularly
the Folger Library in Washington. That library holds a large song
collection which Olson knew better than the staff.
At the same time, because of his lack of formal training and
credentials, he was never certain of his acceptance by academic
folklorists.
Even so, it was as a so-called private scholar, that is, a serious
student of both musical and textual relationships of stage, popular and
folk musics of the pre-Victorian British Isles that Olson earned an
international reputation among students of folk song. (Indeed among this
last requests even as he lay in his hospital bed were for the personal
telephone numbers of two scholars in Great Britain, Steve Roud and Jack
Campion, and instructions how to dial them directly. He also asked for the
number of American Norm Cohen, like Olson a retired chemist who conducts
research into folk song. Olson intended to say goodbye personally to them,
he told a friend.)
Like all true scholars, Olson was generous with his research. A
stranger's query on any of a half-dozen listserves to which Olson
subscribed would produce a lengthy reply culled from his large database --
and an addenda correcting errors in his first, hastily pasted message.
"That was just like him," his son Kenneth said. "All his life he
couldn't just answer yes or no. He always had to give a full answer, an
explanation."
It was that which drove his ballad research as well.
Olson is survived by his wife, Barbara T. Olson; three sons, Douglas of
Laurel, Maryland, Bryan of San Jose, California, and Kenneth of
Gaithersburg, Maryland; and two sisters, Beryl of Bremerton, Washington;
and Carol Kimsay, a resident of California.
Olson's voluminous research -- updated a final time just days before he
entered the hospital -- is posted at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arrangements will
be made, Kenneth Olson said, to permanently archive his website.
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