Harry Peter "Happy" Traum (May 9, 1938 – July 17, 2024) was an American folk musician who was a linchpin of the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s and the post-Woodstock artistic movement of the '70s and '80s. His influence was not limited to his music; he also served as editor of Sing Out! magazine, a significant platform in the folk music community. Additionally, he ran Homespun Tapes, a company that sold instructional tapes narrated by well-known folk and rock artists for over 40 years.
Born in the Bronx, New York City, to parents who were of German Jewish heritage (on his father's side) and English and Dutch heritage (on his mother's side). "Happy" was a family nickname. He attended the High School of Music and Art and later received his bachelor's degree at New York University. As a teen he began playing guitar and 5-string banjo and attended music gatherings at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, eventually joining that thriving community.
His first recorded output appeared in 1962 with the release of Folkways' Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, featuring Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Peter LaFarge, and the Freedom Singers.
Traum also sang a duet with Dylan, who performed under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, on his anti-war song "Let Me Die in My Footsteps". He was a member of the New World Singers, which featured Bob Cohen and Gil Turner, who cut the first recorded version of Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" in 1963. He also formed a short-lived folk-rock band in the mid-'60s called the Children of Paradise with his brother Artie, Eric Kaz, and others.
In 1965 he wrote the book Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar, which led to the launch of Homespun Music, a music instructional label and publisher that produced and distributed audio and video lessons for all manner of instruments for many styles, skill levels, and techniques. Across its more than 50 years in business, untold numbers of musicians around the world learned to play from the lessons that the imprint offered, and the case can be strongly made that there are musical traditions whose continued existence is owed to Happy’s efforts with Homespun.
In 1971 Traum once again joined Dylan in the studio, playing guitar, banjo, bass, and singing harmony on four songs, which appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II and The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 – Another Self Portrait (1969–1971). Dylan also invited Happy to participate in a famous session with poet Allen Ginsberg, which resulted in the box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll. Traum later worked with Artie as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, who went on to issue four studio albums: Happy and Artie Traum (1969), Double Back (1971), Hard Times in the Country (1975), and The Test of Time (1994).
A talented blues guitarist known for his deft fingerpicking -- he spent several years under the tutelage of folk and Piedmont blues singer and guitarist Brownie McGhee -- Traum's solo efforts, which include Relax Your Mind (1975), American Stranger (1977), Buckets of Songs (1987), and I Walk the Road Again (2005) showcased his deep understanding of classic and contemporary folk styles, and how they were shaped by American roots music. Traum's last solo album, There's a Bright Side Somewhere, appeared in 2022, two years before his death from cancer on July 17, 2024 , at the age of 86.
(Edited from Wikipedia, Chronogram & AllMusic)
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