Harry Peter "Happy" Traum anchored both the Greenwich Village folk community throughout the 1960s and the creative surge that followed Woodstock during the ensuing two decades. Beyond performing, he edited Sing Out! magazine and operated Homespun Tapes, whose catalog of lessons delivered by prominent folk and rock figures remained active for more than forty years.
He entered the world in the Bronx on May 9, 1938, studied at the High School of Music and Art, and completed a bachelor’s degree at New York University. While still a teenager he joined the regular gatherings in Washington Square Park, soon becoming a fixture inside that circle. His earliest appearance on record came in 1962 on Folkways’ Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, alongside Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Peter LaFarge, and the Freedom Singers. As a member of the New World Singers he participated in the first commercial recording of Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” in 1963, an association that continued through the 1970s and 1980s.
In the middle of the decade he formed the short-lived folk-rock group Children of Paradise with his brother Artie, Eric Kaz, and additional musicians. Later the brothers recorded together as Happy and Artie Traum, releasing four studio albums: Happy and Artie Traum (1969), Double Back (1971), Hard Times in the Country (1975), and The Test of Time (1994).
A skilled blues guitarist whose fingerpicking technique benefited from years of study with folk and Piedmont blues singer and guitarist Brownie McGhee, Traum explored both traditional and modern folk idioms on his solo releases Relax Your Mind (1975), American Stranger (1977), Buckets of Songs (1987), and I Walk the Road Again (2005). His final solo album, There’s a Bright Side Somewhere, appeared in 2022; he died of cancer on July 17, 2024.
