A Tribute to Happy Traum

1961 was a remarkable year, in which the USA was first being led by a young idealistic president, John F. Kennedy.  It was also the year of the Freedom Rides, when busloads of Freedom Riders had their buses attacked and burned when proceeding through the South, attempting to integrate restrooms and eating places.

And it was the year of the Washington Square folk-song “riot.” That spring, a community group asked New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation to do something about the hundreds of “roving troubadours and their followers” playing music around the fountain on Sunday afternoons.  This tradition had begun in the 1940s and ’50s when Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger inspired the Folk Music revival in Greenwich Village. In the late 1950s the parks commission began issuing permits to limit the number of musicians, allowing them to play and sing only on Sunday afternoons, provided there were no drums. People back then apparently were very concerned about beatnik bongo drums.

Then, all of a sudden, Sunday singing was banned in Washington Park.  The owner of the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, Izzy Young, organized with others a nonviolent protest demonstration against the ban on folksinging in the park, at which on Sunday, April 9, 1961, a few hundred people gathered, including a young folksinger named Happy Traum, plus a few hundred additional  spectators.

Young’s Folklore Center, not far from the park, was a hangout for everyone interested in the Greenwich Village folk scene, including Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk.  Even though Izzie Young got all the protestors to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” the cops still arrested protestors.

The conservative New York Mirror ran a story on the folksong protest beneath the garish headline, “3000 Beatniks Riot in Village.”

After that famous beatnik riot, Happy Traum was active in the New York City folk music movement that included Dave Van Ronk, David Blue, Phil Ochs, Richie Havens, and of course the quickly rising Bob Dylan.  Happy and his brother Artie both made early reputations for their talents as singers and guitarists through the 1960s.  Activists often had guitars in their apartments, and the folksingers were very much part of the historic Civil Rights movement that ended overt segregation in the South.  Racist authorities in the South sneered at Civil Rights activists trying to integrate restrooms and restaurants as “dirty beatniks.”

Then came long hair, tie-dyed apparel, and the so-called Youth Revolution, and the racists’ pejoratives shifted from “dirty beatniks!” to “dirty hippies.”

It was in 1967, during the year of the Summer of Love, that Happy Traum, his wife Jane, and their children moved to Woodstock, where he joined a folk music community that included John Herald, Eric Anderson, and others, including Dylan who was then also living in Woodstock..

In the late 1960s, I had settled in the Lower East Side where I operated the Peace Eye Bookstore, and had formed a folk-rock satire band, The Fugs.  By 1967 and the emergence of the “Back to the Land” movement, I had heard about the attractiveness of Woodstock for musicians, artists and writers.

Happy Traum became a key component of the Woodstock music scene. In 1967, 1968 and ’69, there was a series of popular concerts held on Glasco Turnpike outside of Woodstock, at first on a farm where now the Woodstock Day School is located.  These concerts were called Sound-Outs and later Sound Festivals.  The first Sound-Out in 1967 had over twenty performers, including Richie Havens, Tim Hardin and Phil Ochs, and attracted over 2,000 to the three-day event.

The name was switched to Sound Festival, which were held in July and August of 1968, featuring Tim Hardin, the Blues Magoos, Happy and Artie Traum, Lothar and the Hand People, Don McLean, Peter Walker, Procol Harum, and others, including the Pablo Light Show.

In addition to performing, Happy helped promote the Sound Festivals.  Once he told me about an incident when he was accosted by an opponent of the Sound Festival while he was tacking up a Sound  Festival poster.

The success of the Sound-Outs and Sound Festivals helped spur the Woodstock Festival.  At the same time, 1969 saw the issue of long-haired youth and “Hippies” become a hot issue in Woodstock.  In June, just weeks before the Woodstock Festival in Bethel, there were two well-attended public meetings, one of them covered in a local paper under the headline:

At these meetings, although a few called for arresting and banning undesirable visitors, prominent Woodstockers made the case for staying calm over the so-called invasion of long-haired people looking to explore Woodstock and its ways.  After all, Woodstock had been an Art Colony over 60 years by then, and was thriving.

However, there was so much interest in the upcoming Woodstock Festival that the Chamber of Commerce mailed out the following postcard to answer inquiries:

Postcard sent out by the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce in the Summer of 1969

One thing I always admired about Happy and his brother Artie was their willingness, even eagerness, over the decades to sing for Good Causes.   In my work as a volunteer at the Alf Evers Archive at the Byrdcliffe Guild, I came across a clipping from 1970 of Happy singing at a benefit concert at Edgar Rosenblum’s Woodstock Playhouse for the brilliant John Herald, whose house had just been destroyed by fire. He and Jane were close to Dylan in Woodstock, even storing a trunk of fan mail to Dylan for him.

Happy Traum was a fantastically talented guitarist and singer, who stood out in a mix of talented guitarists and musicians in Woodstock.  Now he has been taken from us.  I first met him back in 1961 when he sang at an anti-nuclear-war rally in New Haven, Connecticut, and I was taking part in protests against the Polaris submarines, which were armed with nuclear missiles programmed to strike Russian targets.

He almost always had a smile on his face and spoke always with good will and hope for a better, more sharing world.

All hail to Happy Traum for the example of his life!!

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