Dan Hicks (singer)
Daniel Ivan Hicks (December 9, 1941 – February 6, 2016) was an American singer-songwriter and musician, and the leader of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. His idiosyncratic style combined elements of cowboy folk, jazz, country, swing, bluegrass, pop, and gypsy music. He is perhaps best known for the songs "I Scare Myself" and "Canned Music". His songs are frequently infused with humor, as evidenced by the title of his tune "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?" His album Live at Davies (2013) capped over forty years of music.
Dan Hicks
Daniel Ivan Hicks
December 9, 1941
Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
February 6, 2016 (aged 74)
Mill Valley, California, U.S.
- Singer
- songwriter
- musician
- Guitar
- drums
1965–2016
Writing about Hicks for Oxford American in 2007, critic David Smay said, "[T]here was a time from the ’20s through the ’40s when swing—'hot rhythm'—rippled through every form of popular music. That’s the music Dan Hicks plays, and there’s no single word for it because it wasn’t limited to any one genre. Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers and Spade Cooley and Hank Garland and the Boswell Sisters and Stuff Smith and Bing Crosby all swing. You can make yourself nutty trying to define what Dan Hicks is. Then again, you could just say: Dan Hicks swings."[1]
Personal life[edit]
Following an on-and-off relationship spanning two decades, Hicks married concert promoter Clare "CT" Wasserman (a protege of Bill Graham and the former wife of bassist Rob Wasserman) in February 1997.[16] He was diagnosed with throat and liver cancer in 2014.[17] In March 2015, Hicks announced that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer.[2] On February 6, 2016, at age 74, he died from cancer at his home in Mill Valley.[18][19]
His posthumous memoir, I Scare Myself, was published in 2017. He spent hours on the phone with journalist Kristine McKenna every Friday for several years before his death. She edited these conversations into Hicks' autobiography.[20]