Dan Hicks, 74, Sweetened the ‘Sixties Rock Scene with Reinhardt-Inspired Hot Swing

For nearly 50 years, Arkansas-born Dan Hicks picked guitar and sang songs that cleverly blended the best of American music styles. Hicks died Feb. 6, at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., after a lengthy bout of throat and liver cancer. He was 74. Though his career began with a rock band called The Charlatans, it didn’t take off until he embraced his true loves: classic jazz, country blues and pop standards. “I’m not really a rock baby,” Hicks told me when I telephoned him while he was touring the East Coast in 2007. “I was aware of Elvis and Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, but I was really more of jazz and folk kinda guy.” Hicks hailed from Little Rock, Ark., but was raised in Northern California where he played drums in his high-school marching band. His influences, he said, ranged from Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, to contemporary jazz poet Tom Waits. “It doesn’t matter what style it is exactly, but what I like is something especially tasteful,” he told me nine years ago. “Right now, I’m listening to the big band channel. I’m prejudiced, I guess, in favor of old standards.” His best-known band, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, was formed in 1967 in San Francisco, Calif. where psychedelic rock bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead dominated the music scene. The Hot Licks stood out as something completely different. Re