Woodstock has been a lot less cheerful this past week after famed folk legend Happy Traum, a major figure in the city’s diverse music community for the past 58 years, died last Wednesday at the age of 86. The name Happy wasn’t ironic, like the imposing Robin Hood ally 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 warmth.

Born in the Bronx on May 9, 1938, Harry Peter Traum first got his nickname from his family, who took him to Greenwich Village at age 16, where he would quickly become known. In an undated post on his illuminating blog, Traum described “my first foray into the exotic streets of Greenwich Village” — not by taking a train downtown from the Bronx, but by escaping a job as a junior counselor at a summer camp.

As Traum recalled, he and some fellow older folkies — “rebellious proto-beatniks from Brandeis University” — set out on a two-hour drive in a late-1940s Plymouth after dark for a “dangerous illegal” adventure.

Arriving in the village, they sipped cappuccinos at Cafe Rienzi on MacDougal Street, “breathed in the fresh bohemian air,” and around midnight made their way to Washington Square Park. There they heard the sound of two acoustic guitars, Traum realized years later, being played by early folk revivalists Raphael “Ray” Boguslav and Dick Greenhaus.

“I was mesmerized by the sounds and the sight of the two friends playing alone for themselves—and us—in the empty park,” Traum wrote. “It never occurred to me to say anything about it. After a while, we walked to the waiting car and the long walk back to camp.”

Traum’s story, and indeed his blog, runs deep in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-20th century, including encounters and friendships with greats like Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and under the tutelage of blues legend Brownie McGhee. It follows a winding pilgrimage from Appalachia to North Carolina just after high school, where he and a friend visited poet Carl Sandburg—he didn’t want to see them—and 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 had first visited a few years earlier, and once he was there, he stayed forever.
“Woodstock, NY has always had a musical resonance for me, ever since I came to play at the old Cafe Espresso on Tinker Street one winter night in 1963,” Traum wrote in his blog. “That summer I was invited to perform at a much larger venue, the first of many performances I have played at the Woodstock Playhouse over the years. As before, many Woodstockers showed a keen interest in the folk music I loved, and I began to meet more of the colorful citizens of the art colony.”

Traum’s blog is full of stories about other, more globally famous musicians – Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Peter Tosh, the Band – but he wasn’t just another Zelig on the fringes of history. Traum and his younger brother Artie, who died of cancer in 2008, were a duo managed by the larger-than-life Albert Grossman.

The duo played the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 and 1969 and released four albums together in the 1970s, the first two for Capitol Records. They would later perform together in the Woodstock Mountains Revue.

Happy Traum was an equally prolific solo artist during that decade. He continued to record and perform music for much of the rest of his life. His last 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 such as Rolling stone, Acoustic guitarAnd Guitaristand was an editor at Sing it out! The Folksong MagazineHe 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 company that has been producing audio and video music lessons for more than 50 years.

It is a testament to Happy Traum’s influence as a musician and music teacher that since his passing, numerous tributes have been posted on the Internet, and probably in coffee houses and at folk concerts as well.
But it wasn’t just the music that people remembered. The stories were also about Happy Traum the man, the human being. His kindness, his generosity, his enthusiasm.

As I was putting this memorial together, I began to collect some of those stories, but there were so many that it became difficult to choose which ones to include. You would be hard-pressed to find a person in the Hudson Valley whose life has not been positively affected by the life of Happy Traum.

Let’s close with excerpts from a message left by Jane Traum, “and the entire Traum family,” on the Homespun website. 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 who fought pancreatic cancer to the end… Happy loved playing music more than anything. I will miss the sounds of his glorious fingerpicking that resonated through the house from his office until the early hours of the night… As my business partner, he inspired me daily. As my life partner, he made every day joyful and rich.”