Woodstock was a good deal less happy this past week after renowned folk legend Happy Traum, an important figure for the past 58 years in the town’s diverse music community, passed away last Wednesday at the age of 86. The name Happy was not ironic, like imposing Robin Hood confederate Little John. For as long as anyone who knew him or knew of him can remember, Happy Traum spread joy through his music and his bonhomie.
Harry Peter Traum was born in the Bronx on May 9, 1938, first earning his nickname from his family and then at the age of 16 taking it to Greenwich Village, where it would soon become well known. In an undated entry on his illuminating blog, Traum detailed “my first foray into the exotic streets of Greenwich Village” — not by hopping a downtown train from the Bronx, but by escaping a job as a junior counselor in a summer camp.
As Traum recalled, he joined some older fellow folkies — “rebellious proto-beatniks from Brandeis University” — on a two-hour drive in a late-Forties Plymouth after lights-out for a “dangerously illicit” adventure.
Upon arrival in the Village, they had cappuccinos at Cafe Rienzi on MacDougal Street, “breathed the fresh air of bohemia,” and found their way to Washington Square Park around midnight. It was there they heard the sound of two acoustic guitars, Traum realized years later, played by early folk revivalists Raphael “Ray” Boguslav and Dick Greenhaus.
“I was transfixed by the sounds and by the sight of the two friends playing only for themselves — and us — in the empty park,” wrote Traum. “It never occurred to me to say anything to them. After a while, we made our way to the waiting car and to the long road back to camp.”
Traum’s history, and indeed his blog, runs deeply through the mid-20th-century Greenwich Village folk scene, with encounters and friendships struck with luminaries like Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and under the tutelage of blues legend Brownie McGhee. It follows a winding Appalachian pilgrimage to North Carolina just after high school, where he and a friend called on poet Carl Sandburg — he wouldn’t see them — and visited the site of the annual Appalachian Folk Festival. They missed it by a few weeks.
Moving to Woodstock with his wife Jane and their three children in 1967 was an important part of Happy Traum’s history. He first visited just a few years earlier, and once he came to stay he stayed forever.
“Woodstock, NY has always had a musical resonance to me, ever since I came to play at the old Cafe Espresso on Tinker Street one wintry night in 1963,” Traum wrote in his blog. “That summer I was invited back to perform at a much larger venue, the first of many appearances I made over the years at the Woodstock Playhouse. As before, many Woodstockers showed a keen interest in the folk music that I loved, and I began meeting more of the colorful citizens of the art colony.”
Traum’s blog brims with stories of other more globally famous musicians – Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Peter Tosh, The Band — but he was no mere Zelig appearing on the edges of history. Traum and his younger brother Artie, who died of cancer in 2008, formed a duo and were managed by larger-than-life figure Albert Grossman.
The pair played the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 and 1969, and released four albums together in the Seventies, the first two for Capitol Records. Later, they would perform together in the Woodstock Mountains Revue.
Happy Traum was an equally prolific solo artist in that decade. He continued recording and playing music for much of the rest of his life. His final album, Just For the Love of It, released in 2015, was recorded in studios in Saugerties, Red Hook and Woodstock.
Traum was also a contributing writer for magazines like Rolling Stone, Acoustic Guitar, and Guitar Player, and was an editor at Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine. He also wrote numerous books, including “Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar,” published in 1965.
After recording tapes for students based on his book, Happy and his wife Jane became co-owners of Homespun Music Instruction, a Woodstock-based business that has produced music lessons on audio and video for over 50 years.
It’s a testament to Happy Traum’s influence as a musician and music teacher that innumerable tributes have reached across the Internet, and likely coffeehouses and folk performances in the days since his passing.
But it wasn’t just the music that people are remembering. The stories are also about Happy Traum the man, the human. His kindness, his generosity, his enthusiasm.
As I put this memorial together I began collecting some of those stories, but there were so many it became difficult to choose which to include. It would be difficult to find someone in the Hudson Valley whose life hasn’t been positively touched by the life of Happy Traum.
Let’s close with excerpts from a message left by Jane Traum, “and all of the Traum family,” on the Homespun website. Please visit homespun.com to read it in full.
“Happy Traum, my partner in life and work, passed away on Wednesday, July 17th. He was a brave soul, fighting pancreatic cancer to the very end .… Happy loved playing music more than anything else. I will miss the sounds of his glorious fingerpicking filtering through the house from his office until the wee hours of the night…As my business partner he inspired me daily. As my life partner he made every day joyous and rich.”
Join the family! 
