Daniel Ivan Hicks (December 9, 1941 – February 6, 2016) was an American singer-songwriter known for an idiosyncratic style that combined elements of cowboy folk, jazz, country, swing, bluegrass, pop, and gypsy music. He led ″Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks″. 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.

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.”

Hicks was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on December 9, 1941. His father, Ivan L. Hicks (married to the former Evelyn Kehl), was a career United States Air Force non-commissioned officer. At age five, an only child, Hicks moved with his family to California. Following brief stints in Lomita, Cambria, and Vallejo, the family settled in Santa Rosa, the largest city in the North Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was a drummer in grade school and played the snare drum in his school marching band.