Happy Traum

All Music Guide:

Happy Traum is a singer/songwriter based in Woodstock, New York who served as editor of Sing Out! magazine for three years and has run Homespun Tapes -- a company that sells instructional tapes for aspiring musicians narrated by well-known folk and rock artists -- for over 40. Born in the Bronx, Traum attended the High School of Music and Art, where he took up music and was drawn into the folk music boom of the late '50s in the New York area. He was a member of the New World Singers and formed a folk-rock band in the mid-'60s called the Children of Paradise with his brother Artie, Eric Kaz, and others. He moved to Woodstock in 1967. Traum conducted one of the first interviews Bob Dylan granted after his 1966 motorcycle accident and, in October 1971, recorded several tracks with Dylan that appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. He has made solo albums, records with his brother, and recordings with the Woodstock Mountain Revue.

Wikipedia:

Happy Traum (b. Harry Peter Traum, May 9, 1938, The Bronx, New York City) is an American folk musician who started playing music in the Fifties. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother. They released three albums, Happy and Artie Traum (1970, Capitol), Double Back (1971, Capitol) and Hard Times In The Country (1975, Rounder). He has continued as a solo artist and as founder of Homespun Tapes.

Music career

Collaborations with Bob Dylan

Traum first appeared on record at a historic session in late 1962 when a group of young folk musicians, including Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Peter LaFarge and The Freedom Singers, gathered in the studio at Folkways Records to record an album called Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1. With his group, The New World Singers, Traum cut the first version of "Blowin' in the Wind" to be released (early 1963). Traum also sang a duet with Dylan, who performed under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, on his anti-war song "Let Me Die in My Footsteps". These tracks were re-released in August 2000 by Smithsonian Folkways as part of a boxed set, The Best of Broadside 1962 - 1988: Anthems from the American Underground. Later that year, The New World Singers, which featured Traum, Bob Cohen and Gil Turner, recorded an album for Atlantic Records, with liner notes by Dylan. The album featured the first recording of Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"

In 1971 Happy once again joined Dylan in the studio, playing guitar, banjo, bass, and singing harmony on three songs, which appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II. Dylan also invited Happy to participate in a famous session with poet Allen Ginsberg, which resulted in the box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll.

Discography

Solo:

Homespun Tapes

Happy is the founder and president of Homespun Tapes, a company that makes and sells music lessons. Originally these lessons were on analog audio tapes, copied from a master tape to a daisy chain of tape recorders, set up on the family dinner table — hence the name "Homespun Tapes". Nowadays, most lessons are DVD video lessons, either sold by post-order as DVD, or sold as a computer download.

Most lessons available are for acoustic guitar, many oriented at blues and folk music, but there are also lessons for several other instruments, e.g. fiddle, banjo, bass, etc.