At the dawn of the 1960s, Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village was the place to be. The 9.75-acre plot and the blocks around it were the crucible of the folk music revival that would reshape the course of popular culture, and many of the young musical figures who sprang from the scene at the park’s celebrated Sunday hootenanny sessions would later beat a path north to the Woodstock area. Two who did were Lovin’ Spoonful leader John Sebastian and folk icon Happy Traum.
“I was talking about that time with [Happy’s late brother and musical partner] Artie Traum a few years back,” Sebastian says. “I don’t remember exactly when Happy and I met, but it would have to have been early on at one of the get-togethers at Washington Square Park. Happy was always just a vortex of music, he was the center of so much of it.” This month, the singer’s departed friend, who passed in 2024, will once again be the center of the music when “There’s a Bright Side Somewhere: A Tribute to Happy Traum,” a program honoring his life and songs, takes place at City Winery’s Manhattan and Hudson Valley locations, with Sebastian among the featured performers on August 5 and 6.
Blues on the Square
Sebastian grew up at ground zero of the folk boom, in an apartment building on Washington Square West whose other tenants included Eleanor Roosevelt. “I think my family got in there because the owners liked my dad and were happy to have someone across the hall who’d look out for her,” he says. The future rocker’s mother, Jane Sebastian, was a comedic radio and stage script writer (“the Tina Fey of her time”), and his father, for whom he’s named, was a renowned classical harmonica player (“the Segovia of his instrument”) who had a strong interest in folk and ethnic music and often took the clan on his tours of Europe. “I Love Lucy” star Vivian Vance was his mom’s best friend and his godmother; in 1949, another family friend, singer and actor Burl Ives, talked his father into hosting a nomadic folksinger. “Burl said, ‘This guy’s kind of an Okie but would you mind putting him up for a little while?’” Sebastian recalls. “It was Woody Guthrie. I was five years old and I’d hear him playing in the guest room. I remember thinking, ‘He’s okay but he’s not as good as Dad,’” he says with a laugh.
Unsurprisingly, the harmonica was the first instrument he learned, followed by guitar and autoharp. He spent summers at a camp in New Hampshire where folk music was a key component. “There were a lot of kids there whose families were part of the Cambridge [Massachusetts] folk crowd,” Sebastian explains. “We’d sing in little groups and I learned Carter Family-style picking.” By the early ’60s he’d become more drawn to the blues of harmonica players like Sonny Terry, rather than the classical styles of his father. Catching Lead Belly and Mississippi John Hurt in the Village pulled him in deeper, as did briefly serving as Lightnin’ Hopkins’s unofficial valet when he was a teenager after meeting him as a spectator at a TV variety show. “Joan Baez, who was about 17 or 18 then, was another one of the guests, and Lightnin’ did a song that was mildly dirty and made her laugh, although I wasn’t sure if anyone else got it,” remembers Sebastian.
In 1963, after attending NYU for a little over a year, he dropped out to play music and never looked back, making his recording debut on a session for folksinger Billy Faier and joining the Even Dozen Jug Band, whose lineup also included David Grisman, Steve Katz (later of the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat and Tears), Maria Muldaur (then Maria D’Amato), and pianist Joshua Rifkin. He also played in the Mugwumps with the Mamas and the Papas’ Cass Elliot—who would provide him with a life-changing link.
Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?
“Cass was forever the Jewish matchmaker, she was matching up boys to play in bands like a house afire,” Sebastian said in 2012. In early 1964 when it was announced that the Beatles would be making their American television debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Elliot set up a viewing party at her home and invited him over. “She said Ringo was going to be there, but ‘Ringo’ turned out to be Zal,” he says, with a laugh. Zalman Yanovsky was a 19-year-old Canadian guitarist and sometime Mugwump and, like Sebastian, a blues-loving folkie who wanted to get into rock ’n’ roll. “Right away, we bonded over stuff like Carl Perkins,” says Sebastian, for whom the connection came at the perfect time. “I was tired of people imitating Pete Seeger. I was more inspired by Huey Piano Smith and Gus Cannon. I wanted to do something that was more rockin’.” Soon after the meeting, he and Yanovsky hooked up with bassist Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler. “When the Beatles were just beginning to hit, some of the other younger folk players had already started getting interested in playing electric guitars,” says Sebastian, who saw the birth of so-called folk rock as simply a natural evolution.
Naming their new quartet the Lovin’ Spoonful, after a line in the Mississippi John Hurt song “Coffee Blues,” the singer and his bandmates worked with producer Eric Jacobsen on demos and looked for a record deal. To pay the bills in the interim, he gigged as a studio musician, playing harmonica on records by Judy Collins, Fred Neil, and others. In January 1965, Bob Dylan, another famous friend of Happy Traum, recruited him to play bass on the sessions for Bringing It All Back Home, although his tracks weren’t used. Nevertheless, Dylan dug the New Yorker’s vibe and playing, and when it came time to put together a band to tour on the album, he reached out.
“One day, the Spoonful was rehearsing and the phone rang,” Sebastian recounts. “It was Dylan, and he was saying [imitates Dylan’s nasal voice], ‘I’m goin’ on tour, and, um, well, I was thinkin’ maybe you could do this and we could do that, and then we could…’ So here’s Dylan asking me to join his band. But our band was sounding really good and I didn’t want to leave it. So I said, ‘Well, thanks, Bob. But I think we’ve got something happening here.’” Indeed, they did.
Let the Boy Rock and Roll
Signed to Kama Sutra Records, the Lovin’ Spoonful debuted on LP in October 1965 with Do You Believe in Magic, whose title-track single, an infectious fusion of Motown, blues, and folk, quickly shot to number nine on the national chart. “We were driving a rental car from the airport into LA when it came on the radio right after ‘California Girls’ by the Beach Boys,” says Sebastian. “We all just freaked out and started punching each other, laughing.” Over the next two years, the group would place many more singles in the US Top 10, all of them, like their first, eternal pop classics that never fail to lift one’s mood: “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” “Daydream,” “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?,” “Jugband Music,” “Rain on the Roof,” “Nashville Cats,” “Good Time Music,” “Darling Be Home Soon,” and the game-changing, chart-topping “Summer in the City.” In 1966 the foursome was the biggest-selling singles act in America, eclipsed only by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They headlined US and European tours, appeared on movie soundtracks, and played on major TV shows.
Unfortunately, that same year, their momentum was dramatically hobbled when Yanovsky and Boone were busted for marijuana possession in San Francisco. With Yanovsky facing deportation back to Canada, the pair reluctantly gave up the identity of the dealer who’d sold them the weed—a move that prompted a backlash against the band by the rock counterculture, which accused them of being informants. Internal tensions saw Yanovksy leave the band in June 1967, to be replaced by Jerry Yester, and the outfit soldiered on for another year before splitting up (the lineup would reunite to appear in Paul Simon’s 1980 film One Trick Pony; Yanovksy died of a heart attack in 2002).
Following the breakup, Sebastian composed music for the 1969 Broadway play “Jimmy Shine” starring Dustin Hoffman and, after he’d already gotten high, was coaxed into doing an unplanned solo acoustic set at that summer’s Woodstock festival. In 1970 Reprise Records released John B. Sebastian, his solo debut, which went to number 20 on the Billboard charts, and the heady year as well found him jamming with Jimi Hendrix on Timothy Leary’s album You Can Be Anyone This Time Around and blowing harmonica on the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Deja Vu” after he’d turned down an offer to join the latter group. He settled into a steady career under his own name that included the making of Welcome Back, whose title track, a 1976 number one single, was the theme song of the smash sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.” The success of the song led to he and his wife, the photographer Catherine Sebastian, purchasing the Woodstock home they’ve lived in since that year.
Younger Generation
“I’d been coming up to Woodstock since 1962, when Dylan and Albert Grossman were here,” says Sebastian, who has continued to release solo albums and make soundtrack music, notably for the 1980s “Care Bears” and “Strawberry Shortcake” animated series, in addition to occasionally working as a TV presenter. Already deeply ensconced in Woodstock when he and Catherine arrived were Happy Traum and his wife, Jane Traum, who’d moved their family to town in 1967. “Happy came to my aid so many times,” he says. “There were times when it felt like the music I was making was wildly out of fashion, but he really kept me going. And Jane was always ready to feed us when we visited.”
Besides quickly finding a spot in Happy and Artie Traum’s ever-changing Woodstock Mountain Revue musical collective, Sebastian was especially eager to become one of the artists who created video lessons for Happy’s Homespun Music instructional label, for whom he recorded six tutorial DVDs. “Working with Homespun has been one of the smoothest exchanges of music and business I’ve been involved in,” he told Chronogram in 2007. The father of two has regularly collaborated with NRBQ and in the 1990s performed in the J-Band with blues mandolin great Yank Rachell and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band’s Fritz Richmond and Geoff Muldaur. He’s also come to be rightly revered as an influential elder statesman by next-generation players, recording with the Bongos’ Richard Barone and New York band Daddy Long Legs. “He played baritone guitar on our newest record [2023’s Street Sermons], but he’s a legend on harmonica,” says Daddy Long Legs singer Brian Hurd, a demon on the instrument himself. “We’re all big Spoonful fans.”
Lately the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has been helping with work on Rainbows All Over Your Blues, on a biopic telling his story. But it’s Happy Traum’s story that Sebastian is looking forward to honoring at the City Winery shows, which will also star David Amram, Jimmy Vivino, Brian Mitchell, and others. “Happy was a serious teacher of music, but he was also a gifted live performer,” says Sebastian, whose most recent release is 2021’s Explore the Spoonful Songbook, a duo set with guitar whiz Arlen Roth. “His audience members included serious musicians and casual music lovers. Which is quite a rare thing.”
This article appears in August 2026.
