Happy Traum, a longtime pillar in the folk music scene and an early collaborator with Bob Dylan, died on Wednesday, July 17, at age 86.

Born Harry Traum in the Bronx borough of New York City in 1938, he eventually adopted the name “Happy,” a family nickname. As a teen, he was inspired to learn banjo after seeing a performance by Pete Seeger. When Traum took up guitar, he began studying with the Piedmont blues master guitarist Brownie McGhee. Soon, Traum was a participant in the Greenwich Village folk scene, the epicenter of the American folk revival of the late 1950s. As a member of the folk group New World Singers, Traum and his bandmates attracted the attention of an aspiring folk musician who had recently relocated to New York from Minnesota: Bob Dylan.

In late 1962 and early 1963, the New World Singers — along with Dylan, Seeger, and Phil Ochs — participated in a now-legendary recording session known as the Broadside Sessions, supported by the folk magazine Broadside. During those sessions, the New World Singers recorded what became the first commercial releases of Dylan’s songs “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Traum and Dylan also recorded a duet of a Dylan-penned anti-war song, “I Will Not Go Down Under the Ground (Let Me Die in My Footsteps).”

In the late-1960s, Traum and his wife, Jane, relocated from New York City to Woodstock, New York. There, Traum and his brother formed the folk duo Happy and Artie Traum. The two performed together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, and together they released four albums, the latest being 1994’s Test of Time. Happy and Artie Traum continued their collaborations until Artie’s death from ocular cancer in 2008.

Meanwhile, Traum’s friendship with Bob Dylan continued, particularly when they both lived in the town of Woodstock. In 1971, Dylan invited Traum to record four songs that would eventually land on the album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II, including a new version of “I Shall Be Released,” which Dylan had first recorded with The Band in 1967.

In addition to his work as a performer and recording artist, Happy Traum’s arguably greatest impact was as an innovative music educator. In 1965, Traum wrote a book, Fingerpicking Styles of Guitar, which became a best-selling instruction book. Wanting to take the lessons further, Traum hatched the idea of recording instructional tapes that could be sent out with printed material as a mail-order lesson. In 1967, Traum and his wife launched Homespun Music Instruction, a name Jane landed on because she and Happy were spinning the reel-to-reel tapes on their kitchen table. “It was her brainchild,” Traum recalled in an interview on the Bluegrass Jam Along podcast in 2022. “Jane … has been part of the business; actually, probably the bigger part of the business. I do the music stuff, and she keeps it all together. So she's the reason it still exists, really.”

For more than 50 years, Homespun Music Instruction has seen its medium of choice move from reel-to-reel tapes to cassette tapes to CDs to VHS to DVDs and, most recently, to streaming video. And besides Traum himself, the instructors who have given lessons through Homespun have included such artists as Doc Watson, Keb’ Mo’, Tony Rice, Etta Baker, Chris Thile, Jay Ungar, Odetta, Cindy Cashdollar, Sam Bush, and many other great musicians across a range of instrumental and vocal music. Given that a number of the Homespun instructors are no longer living, the catalog itself is a vast historic record of music and the musicians who have played it. Reflecting on Homespun’s deep archive, Bluegrass Jam Along host Matt Hutchinson has observed, “It is a sort of living document of how the music's changed and the major people in it, and it's incredibly valuable in its own right for that.”

David Lusterman, the founder and publisher of Acoustic Guitar magazine, describes Happy Traum as “a Renaissance man in both senses of the term, a person of wide and deep interests and pursuits and a man capable of invention and reinvention throughout the long life that just ended after 86 eventful years. He accomplished what many people yearn for — a balanced life, in which art, commerce, family, and friends peacefully and fruitfully bonded and blended.”

Writing on the Homespun website after her husband’s passing, Jane Traum wrote, “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. … Happy will be deeply missed by all at Homespun. His music will live on.”

External Link

Happy Traum – official site