Happy Traum, Greenwich Village Folksinger and Bob Dylan Collaborator, Dead at 86

Happy Traum, a stalwart of the Greenwich Village and Woodstock folk scenes and longtime friend and collaborator of Bob Dylan, died on Wednesday at age 86. The Hudson Valley magazine Chronogram first reported the musician’s death, and his close friend and fellow musician John Sebastian confirmed to RS that the cause was cancer.

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In addition to making records on his own and with his late brother Artie, Traum was also a key figure in the post-Fifties folk scene thanks to his role as an instructor. His 1966 book Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar (one of many he wrote) and the instructional videos he released on his Homespun Tapes company helped several generations of musicians master their instruments. “You want to play like John Hurt or Dr. John?” recalls Sebastian. “He would show you how. He was the cornerstone of this folk community in Woodstock but in the larger picure as well. His contributions to the American music scene are hard to quantify.”

Born in the Bronx on May 9, 1938, Traum was officially named Harry but was nicknamed “Happy” by his family. Long before Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961, Traum was enmeshed in the Village scene in the Fifties and Sixties, studying guitar with blues legend Brownie McGhee and participating in the fabled Sunday afternoon jam sessions at Washington Square Park, where he met one of his heroes, the late Dave Van Ronk. Traum also took part in a 1961 protest against a ban on playing folk music in the park and was briefly seen in Sunday , director Daniel Drasin’s documentary on that day.

“In those days, you didn’t think about making a living from folk music,” Traum said in an interview for the upcoming book Talkin’ Greenwich Village . “There were some people, like Harry Belafonte and Theodore Bikel, who became famous. But most of the time you never thought it was a profession. Then in the later part of the Fifties, you started to see cafes and concert venues opening up and hey, you could make $10!”

Traum also met Dylan, then a newcomer to the scene. “I knew him when he first came to New York and in the first couple of years, when he was scuffling around the city and starting to write the songs,” Traum told RS in 2014. As a member of the New World Singers, an interracial folk group that also included Gil Turner and Delores Dixon, Traum became the first to cover Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for the Folkways album Broadside Ballads Vol. 1 (which also included two tracks by Blind Boy Grunt, a.k.a. Dylan himself). Traum and Dylan also duetted on Dylan’s “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” which was eventually released on a Smithsonian Folkways Recordings comp in 2000.

After the breakup of the New World Singers, Traum, along with his brother and fellow musician Artie, briefly formed a rock band, the Children of Paradise. (Artie died of liver cancer in 2008.) More comfortable with acoustic music, Traum, his wife Jane, and their three children relocated in 1967 to Woodstock, New York, where he’d remain for the rest of his life.

There, Traum witnessed the birth of what became Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes . “I knew they were rehearsing for various things, and Robbie [Robertson] had invited my brother and I to his house to hear the rough cuts of the Big Pink stuff,” Traum told Rolling Stone . “I remember he put on these big reel-to-reel tapes on a big tape recorder and we heard that stuff for the first time there. Which was also mind-bending. We didn’t even know what we were listening to. It was startlingly original and heart-wrenching. They weren’t called the Basement Tapes back then. It was just, ‘Here’s what we are working on.'”

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As a duo, the Traum brothers recorded several albums, performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1968 and 1969, and were managed by Albert Grossman, who famously worked with Dylan and Janis Joplin. (A young Patti Smith was among their opening acts.) But rock-level fame didn’t interest Traum as much as keeping alive the traditions of his hero, Pete Seeger. “Happy had this wonderful guitar style but he also had what Pete had,” says Sebastian. “He would just walk on a stage and you were ready to sing along. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t an affected thing.”

Traum was often interviewed about his friendship with Dylan, including a 2014 Rolling Stone cover story that focused on the legendary Basement Tapes . On his website , Traum reflected on the day Dylan randomly called him up to work on 1971’s Greatest Hits Vol. II , when he wanted to re-record some Basement Tapes material. They wound up cutting new versions of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” and “I Shall Be Released.”

“He called and said, ‘Come on down and bring a bass, banjo and guitar,’” Traum recalled. “It was just the two of us and an engineer. They were basically songs from the Basement Tapes and he wanted to put his stamp on them. Bob was trying hard to be anonymous then.” Later, Traum wrote about about his excitement over “Only a Hobo,” an outtake from that session, being included on Vol. 10 of Dylan’s Bootleg Series, 2013’s Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) .

In addition to performing, Traum, whose warm demeanor endeared him to everyone in that world (“Happy’s calm was enviable,” says Sebastian), was also a contributing writer at Rolling Stone , Acoustic Guitar, and Guitar Player , as well as an editor at Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine . His final solo album was 2015’s Just for the Love of It . In a four-star review, Rolling Stone wrote that the record is “a handsome, modestly-virtuosic celebration of folk tradition and a community that still cultivates it. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to his world was the creation, in 1967, of Homespun Tapes, which to include contributions from Donald Fagan, Richard Thompson, Jack DeJohnette, Jorma Kaukonen, Maria Muldaur, Jack Casady and many others.

In the May 17, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone , Traum wrote an essay titled “The Swan Song of Folk Music.” “Folk music should be considered a thing of the past,” Traum wrote. “But I keep thinking of a line from an early Dylan song: ‘It looks like it’s a-dyin’/And it’s hardly been born.'”

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