Jazz historian Dick Allen, whose scholarly command of traditional New Orleans jazz was matched only by his role as a French Quarter character, has died. He was 80.

Allen died Thursday at the Veterans Memorial Hospital in Dublin, Ga., where he had been confined to a bed since leaving New Orleans in 2003. His older sister, Betty Smith, said he died of heart failure.

"One of the nurses said, 'Our clown has died,"' Smith said a bout her brother's death. "He just loved New Orleans. He must have had a premonition that he had to leave because he probably would have drowned (during Hurricane Katrina) because he was in a nursing home there."

"In a town that enshrines and cherishes characters, Dick was one of the great ones," said Robert H. Patterson, who worked with Allen at Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, a premier collection of oral histories of traditional jazz which Allen began in 1958.

Allen and Bill Russell began recording interviews with traditional jazz musicians in the mid-1950s in an oral history project that grew into the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane. He was associate curator of the archive from 1958 to 1965 and curator from 1965 to 1980. He retired in 1992.

"He was very good at listening, but above all as a friend to many of these musicians they forgot about the tape recorder and revealed themselves to him," said Bruce Raeburn, the curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive.

Whitney Balliett, the jazz historian and critic, introduced Allen at a conference in New York in 1967 as not only the curator of the Tulane jazz archive but also "the curator of present-day New Orleans jazz."

"He has been directly involved with the music since the early '50s," Balliett said at the time, "and in that time he has run a record shop in New Orleans, made recordings, done countless interviews, become the friend and confidant of all New Orleans musicians and been an adviser and guide to everyone from television networks to old ladies in pursuit of George Lewis."

Allen also was the author of numerous articles, liner notes and program notes. He was also a consultant, instructor, production adviser, producer or curator for many institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.

In addition, he was among the original founders of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which draws thousands of people to the city annually.

He studied trombone under "Professor" Manuel Manetta, the teacher of Jelly Roll Morton, Red Allen and many other New Orleans musicians.

His knowledge of New Orleans jazz was encyclopedic, and William M. Weinberg in his "Studies in Jazz Discography" praised Allen as someone who "has probably done more than any other individual on the university level to develop jazz archives."

Allen was born on Jan. 29, 1927, near Milledgeville, Ga., at Allen's Invalid Home, a home for mentally ill patients established by his grandfather, Dr. Henry Dawson Allen, and later operated by his father and uncle.

Like other family members, Allen attended elementary and high school at Georgia Military College in Milledgeville. He studied at Princeton University before serving in the Navy during World War II and returned to the United States to graduate from the University of Georgia.

Smith said the funeral would take place Monday in Milledgeville.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)