"I don't think you could get a job with King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton if you couldn't read"
more ignorance about king oliver from josepp.
Oliver, Joe 'King'

"Cornetist Joe Oliver blew the blues through brass, and helped bring bottom-up swing to New Orleans at the turn of the century. He played a key part in turning that city's band music into what we now call jazz.

Like many early Louisiana musicians who came off the plantation, which Oliver almost certainly did, he had little formal musical education, nor did he show great musical promise in his youth."
while Oliver later learned to read music, his approach was one that copied Buddy Bolden.
"Oliver soon began to play weekends at the Eagle Saloon on Rampart Street with one of New Orleans' preeminent bands, the Eagle Band. Again he had a rough start; at first, the band sent him home because "he played so loud and so bad."

There was a reason: the Eagle Band musicians had played with the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden before his mental breakdown. They continued Bolden's unleashed, bottom-up musical approach which depended not on reading or formalities, but on guts."