Event

AN EVENING WITH HAPPY TRAUM

Happy will do a fascinating presentation with music and pictures on growing up in the folk music scene in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, NY, in the 60's, and also play a set of music. A really unique evening.

Happy Traum was smitten by American folk music as a teenager and began playing guitar and 5-string banjo. He was an active participant of the legendary Washington Square/Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s and 60s, and studied guitar with the famed blues master, Brownie McGhee.

Over the past five decades he has performed extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, both as a soloist and as a member of various groups. His avid interest in traditional and contemporary music has brought him recognition as a performer, writer, editor, session musician, folklorist, teacher and recording artist.

Happy's first appearance in a recording studio was at a historic session in 1963 when a group of young folk musicians, including Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Peter LaFarge and The Freedom Singers gathered in Folkways Records' studio for an album called Broadsides. Happy with his group, the New World Singers, cut the first recorded version of "Blowin' In The Wind", and Happy sang a duet with Dylan on his anti-war song "Let Me Die in My Footsteps."(These tracks were re-released in August, 2000 by Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings as part of a boxed set, "The Best of Broadsides 1962 - 1988: Anthems from the American Underground."

The New World Singers (Happy, Bob Cohen and Gil Turner) soon recorded an album for Atlantic Records, with liner notes by Bob Dylan, and released a single of the first recorded version of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." The group toured folk clubs throughout the U.S. and Canada, including several stints at Gerde's Folk City and the Bitter End in the Village, the Riverboat in Toronto and the Gate of Horn in Chicago.