Remembering Happy Traum (1938–2024)

Back in 2022, I got a package in the mail with a new CD of 13 songs sung and played by Happy Traum and 18 of his friends and neighbors in the Hudson Valley region of New York, some of whom, like John Sebastian, he’d been making music with for 60+ years. 

“Damn,” I remember thinking, “he’s 84 years old and he sounds better than ever!” Not just the familiar, rhythmic fingerstyle guitar that he learned from Brownie McGhee and fused with the effervescence of John Hurt. Not just the tuneful, rousing interplay of voices and timbres from a pantheon of roots music virtuosos. But Happy’s singing voice—strong, inviting, reflective, and above all, narrative, drawing me into the story of each song.

The last time I spoke to Happy was shortly after that CD was released two years ago. But by the merest chance, I had been listening to it while cooking dinner the day he passed away last week. When I got the news, I was looking down at the CD sleeve and reading Happy’s brief but characteristically modest inscription: “I hope you enjoy these songs.”

Happy Traum was 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. 

Performer, artist, author, editor, producer, and entrepreneur, Happy was above all a teacher. Homespun Instruction, the business he and his wife, Jane, launched to make practice tapes for his students when Happy was away touring, soon became a complex and demanding enterprise in its own right.

It would be no exaggeration to see a parallel between the Lomax family’s accomplishments in recording and preserving the legacy of American roots music and the Traums’ brilliance in sharing the craft and techniques of the generations of leading American roots musicians who drew deeply from the Lomax well. It’s easy to forget the relatively modest access we had to such information before the advent of the worldwide web and in the process forget how groundbreaking the Traums’ work had been.

That 2022 CD, by the way, is called There’s a Bright Side Somewhere. If you haven’t heard it yet, now would be a good time. Thanks, Happy, for the songs. 

We have made the November/December 2021 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine available for free download. It includes a feature story on Happy, plus a transcription of his take on “Worried Blues.”