He’s Tied to the Strings : * Teaching guitar techniques via audio and videocassettes has been the dominant theme in Happy Traum’s folk-music career.

The first folk concert that Happy Traum ever saw proved to be much more than just another night out.

Traum was a New York City schoolboy when some of his classmates took him along to a Pete Seeger show in Brooklyn in 1954.

Watching the dean of American folk singers that night, Traum recalls, he realized for the first time that “you could make music that’s socially meaningful, that has historical and cultural value, and that can involve other people in some meaningful way. Not just some icon standing on stage, but music that includes everybody for some common good.”

His idealism sparked, Traum set out on a folk-music career that has emphasized a special sort of human linkage--the kind that takes place between a teacher and a student.

Traum, 53, has known what it’s like to make connections from the stage. He was in on the folk boom of the early ‘60s, launching his recording career in 1963 by singing the first version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” ever issued. In 1971, Traum and Dylan paired up to record intimate versions of “I Shall Be Released,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Down in the Flood” that rounded out “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II” album. From the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s, Traum released well-received albums in various formations, including a duo act with his younger brother, Artie.

But Traum’s vocation as a teacher of music has been the dominant theme in his career. For the past 25 years, he and his wife, Jane, have run a company called Homespun Tapes. It started in 1967, with a reel-to-reel “how-to” tape of folk-guitar techniques that Traum put together in the kitchen of their home in Woodstock, N.Y.

In 1984, Traum’s teaching business entered the video age. Since then he has produced about 75 instructional videos in which an assortment of noteworthy players, including Dr. John, Doc Watson, and Traum’s old master, Seeger, share their techniques.

Traum still performs regularly (including a show Saturday night at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments), but music instruction is now his main business. Last week the Traums were at the National Assn. of Music Merchants trade show in Anaheim, looking to acquaint music dealers with a catalogue of audio and video tapes that range from Richard Thompson on guitar to John Sebastian on Autoharp; from Rick Danko on rock ‘n’ roll electric bass to Mark O’Connor on fiddle and Bela Fleck on banjo.

The day before the trade show began, Traum took time out from setting up his display booth to sit in a canvas director’s chair and chat. A trim man with tousled hair, he wore a small diamond stud in his left earlobe and used a gentle speaking tone. Traum has pronounced laugh lines around his eyes--a fitting mark for a man whose parents initially named him Harry, but started calling him Happy when he was still a baby.

That first Pete Seeger show prompted Traum to take up the guitar and banjo. Finding his way into the folk-music scene wasn’t hard, he said. Among his fellow students at Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art were Peter Yarrow, later of Peter, Paul & Mary, and Eric Weissberg, who would become famous for “Dueling Banjos.”

Traum started his guitar-teaching career on a level that was literally grass roots: leading sing-alongs and giving lessons while working as a summer-camp counselor. While studying English at the Bronx campus of New York University, Traum began making weekly pilgrimages to the folk scene that was germinating during the late ‘50s in Bohemia’s cultural nerve center: Washington Square in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

“I found myself going to Washington Square every Sunday, where there was a very active folk and bluegrass (scene),” Traum said. “We could learn songs from each other, and I could watch other guitarists and pick up tips from them. It was also a very powerful social scene.”

While still in college, Traum and another musician, Dick Weissman, started the New York School of Folk Music--an imposing name for an enterprise based in spare rooms above a music shop. After college, Traum joined a trio called the New World Singers. That’s how he became friendly with Dylan.

“He used to come down to the late shows at Folk City and sit in with us,” Traum recalled. “We thought he was the greatest thing going. A lot of other people felt he was this weird guy singing these horrible songs, but we just knew he was an amazing talent. He would literally feed us his new songs as he wrote them, looking for a different sound” and using the New World Singers to see how his songs would sound in harmony rather than with a single voice.

Traum’s group recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” for a Broadside magazine-sponsored compilation album of politicized folk songs that was released in 1963. Later he said, the New World Singers also recorded the first version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” When the group released an album on Atlantic in 1963, Dylan wrote the liner notes. “Then we went on tour, and we broke up,” Traum said. “We found out more about each other than we wanted to know.”

After a brief dalliance with electric rhythm guitar in a rock band, Traum moved to Woodstock, where a musical community was forming around Dylan and his manager, Albert Grossman. There, Traum renewed his friendship with Dylan (they had lost touch when Dylan’s career skyrocketed around 1964).

“We were spending a lot of family time with him and his kids,” Traum said. “Our kids knew of him almost as another dad.” Traum says that connection during Dylan’s Woodstock years has brought lots of inquiries from Dylan biographers. “I’m willing to talk about professional things, but not when they try to pump us for personal stuff about his family and his relationship with his wife and kids,” he said.

From 1967 to 1970, Traum edited “Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine.” In that capacity, he conducted and published the first interview Dylan gave after the 1966 motorcycle crash that took him out of public view at the height of his popularity.

The job put Traum on something of a hot seat in folk circles. The late ‘60s was a time that folk music, like American culture at large, was being redefined.

“It was a time of real ferment, and certainly the board of directors of a left-wing magazine like ‘Sing Out!’ had a wide variety of opinions that we had to come to grips with. There was everything from ‘Folk music is just a traditional expression of semiliterate farmers and black blues musicians’ to the opposite--that folk music should represent revolutionary ideals and attitudes. My own point of view was in the middle of that. I steered the magazine away from sectarian politics into (something) more music-based.”

Traum also accepted a broad definition of what folk music was. “I was trying to get a wider variety of contemporary songs into the magazine, saying, ‘Let’s not have a narrow definition of folk music; let’s try to widen our horizons.’ ” Traum said he published songs by Joni Mitchell, The Band, and Jerry Jeff Walker--material far afield from a pure traditionalist’s definition of folk.

In the early ‘70s, Happy and Artie Traum were managed by Albert Grossman and took their shot at a share of the fame that Mitchell and other folk-based performers were enjoying. “At that time we were trying to make a real national name for ourselves,” he said. “What we ended up making was a couple of collector’s items. I’ve seen our first album selling for $40 in record shops.

“I was never as much of a songwriter as the guys who were making their marks as singer-songwriters,” Traum added. “My focus was more on the guitar, and in interpreting traditional songs, which is what I still do in my concerts.”

Since those first two Happy and Artie Traum releases on Capitol Records, Traum has recorded for smaller companies including Rounder and Kicking Mule, sometimes solo or with his brother. He’s also made records with informal ensembles such as Mud Acres and the Woodstock Mountains Revue, which included contributions from such friends as Maria Muldaur, John Sebastian and Pat Alger (now a prominent country songwriter whose credits include the Garth Brooks hit “When the Thunder Rolls”).

Teaching was always in the picture too. In 1965, Traum published “Fingerpicking Styles For Guitar,” the first of 15 instructional books he has written. But Traum says he was dissatisfied with written lessons.

“I always felt that the printed page was inadequate for that sort of music. On the page it’s just a note, but if you can show how (an instrumental part) comes in, maybe just before the beat, people can get the nuances. And let’s face it--most folk guitarists never really adequately read music, or even tablature (diagrams with dots on a grid that correspond to finger positions on a guitar fret board). On tape, they can go over and over it.”

Traum gave those first taped lessons himself. “Then I started going to friends of mine who played instruments or styles I didn’t play. Bill Keith had moved to Woodstock, one of the best banjo players in the world. I figured, ‘Why not him?’ I started building up and going farther afield. I saw it was working. People were actually buying these things.”

Traum says he has always had a knack for teaching. “I have a very linear way of thinking. My own talent is that I can break (a music lesson) down in a very clear, concise way.” But not all musicians he approaches are willing to go on video to teach what they know, even with Traum easing the way as producer.

“Sometimes it’s frustrating, because I think it’s someone who may have a lot to offer the world. It’s very rarely been because of money. They’re just not inclined to do it, for whatever reason.”

In some cases, Traum says, musicians want to guard their performing secrets. “I think that’s ridiculous, because (a student) can learn to play all the notes and still never sound like the guy . Also, some musicians don’t feel they can analyze their art and put it into words. We’ve had a few instances where they just couldn’t relax or make sense of what they were trying to say, and we just had to scrap those and move on. We don’t want to put out anything that won’t genuinely teach people.”

Homespun videos cost $49.95 each and a popular title will sell 4,000 to 5,000 copies over several years, Traum said. Recent offerings include videos by Doc Watson on flatpicking guitar, Pete Seeger on banjo, Dr. John on New Orleans piano styles, and Jorma Kaukonen (with Hot Tuna partner Jack Casady) on acoustic guitar. In the works are another Kaukonen tape, this time on electric-guitar styles, and John Sebastian on harmonica (catalogue information is available through Homespun Tapes, Box 694, Woodstock, N.Y. 12498).

Traum acknowledges that there probably is a bigger market for, say, a tape of some famous hard-rock fret-burner showing off power guitar techniques than there is for such Homespun catalogue items as dulcimer, Autoharp and mandolin. But it’s a market Traum is content to ignore, regardless of sales potential.

“It’s not what I like to do,” he said. “I basically go by my own instincts, for what I think is good music.”

* Happy Traum plays Saturday at 8 p.m. at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062-D Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. Tickets: $12. Information: (714) 364-5270.