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 Olsonw@erols.com. Arrangements will be made, Kenneth Olson said, to permanently archive his website.

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Bruce Olson's Website is available at the following locations:
• California State University, Fresno (Folklore Department)
• The Mudcat Cafe
-Joe Offer-