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. He drew on country, call-and-response vocals, jazz phrasing, and no small amount of humor to create a distinctive, albeit sporadic, body of work that earned him a devoted cult following.
Hicks was born December 9, 1941, to a military family then living in Arkansas, and grew up in California, where he was a drummer in a number of high-school bands. He attended college in San Francisco, where he switched to gu...