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Happy Traum (born Harry Peter Traum, May 9, 1938, The Bronx, New York)[1] is an American folk musician who started playing music in the 1950s and became a stalwart of the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s and the Woodstock music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. For several years, he studied blues guitar with Brownie McGhee, who was a big influence on his guitar style. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother.[2] They released several albums, including Happy and Artie Traum (1969, Capitol),[3] Double Back (1971, Capitol), and Hard Times In The Country (1975, Rounder). He has continued as a solo artist and as founder of Homespun Music Instruction.
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.[4] With his group, The New World Singers, Traum cut the first version of "Blowin' in the Wind" to be released (early 1963).[5] 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 four songs, which appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II and The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 – Another Self Portrait (1969–1971).[1] Dylan also invited Happy to participate in a famous session with poet Allen Ginsberg, which resulted in the box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll.[6]
Happy can also be heard on albums with, John Sebastian, Chris Smither, Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Pacheco, Priscilla Herdman, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Eric Andersen, Rory Block, Maria Muldaur, Peter Tosh, Rick Danko, Levon Helm and many others.
