Dan Hicks (singer) - Musical Style

Musical Style

“The Swinger”, The Oxford American, Nov.2007, by David Smay:

“Nobody’s ever come up with a proper label for Dan Hicks. That’s partly because he leapt over the vast jazz divide created by bop. Bebop subdivided the rhythm and broke the melody into cubist fragments until swing was something you did between your ears instead of out on the dance floor. But there 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, the Mills Brothers, Spade Cooley, Hank Garland, the Boswell Sisters, Stuff Smith, and Bing Crosby all swung. You can make yourself nutty trying to define what Dan Hicks is. Then again, you could just say: Dan Hicks swings. And while he may be an idler and a roué, nobody’s written ten better songs about breezing down the road than Dan Hicks. And in the rarefied genre of songs about buzzards & bacon grease, well, he’s the master.”

Yahoo Music Biography of Dan Hicks, by Jason Ankeny:

”Throughout his decades-long career, Dan Hicks stood as one of contemporary music's true eccentrics. While steeped in folk, his acoustic sound knew few musical boundaries, drawing on country, call-and-response vocals, jazz phrasing, and no small amount of humor to create a distinctive, albeit sporadic, body of work which earned him a devoted cult following.”

Dan describing his music in a July 3, 2007 interview before a gig at the Riverwalk Center in Breckenridge, CO (YouTube):

“My music is kind of a blending. We have acoustic instruments. It starts out with kind of a folk music sound, and we add a jazz beat and solos and singing. We have the two girls that sing, and jazz violin, and all that, so it’s kind of light in nature, it’s not loud. And, it’s sort of, in a way, kinda carefree. Most of the songs are, I wouldn’t say funny, but kinda maybe a little humorous. We all like jazz, so we like to play in a jazzy way, with a swing sound you know, so I call it “folk swing”. There are a lot of original tunes that I’ve been writing through the years, so that has its personal touch on it.”