Dee Hicks; Tennessee Hicks Family
Dee Hicks born in Fentress County in 1905. His father was Daniel "Dan'l" hicks (1868-1948), fiddler, balladier and hunter. Joseph, Dee's grandfather, was born in c.1816 on Sulfer Creek, nine miles east of Burksville, KY, and came to Tennessee by 1830 (d.1892); paternal great-grandparents were John Hicks (b. 1780 in North Carolina, died in TN 1848, lived in TN by 1830) and Chrissie (Mills) Hicks (b. 1770), and maternal great-grandparents were Wylie Downs and Chrissie (Nobles) Downs.
Between the two of them, Dee Hicks and his wife Delta contributed 400 songs and tunes to the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture. It's not clear is there's a connection with the Hicks family from North Carolina- John Hicks was born in NC on Jan. 1, 1780, no place is given.
Dee Hicks born in Fentress County in 1905. Father was Daniel "Dan'l" hicks (1868-1948), fiddler, balladier and hunter. Joseph was Dee's grandfather.
Between the two of them, Dee Hicks and his wife Delta contributed 400 songs and tunes to the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture.
Johnny Rae
Dee's counsin is Johnny Rae Hicks born 1918. Johnny Rae's father was Mount Hicks (1881-1958) married Evie Huling (1896-1975), a 23-year-old mother, fourteen years his junior. Grandfather Johnny Hicks mother's father was James Huling. With two children of his own, Mount rented a house for his new family in Gernt, a lumber camp on White Oak Creek in Fentress County, and began hauling timber to the sawmills. Johnny Ray Hicks was born October 21, 1925 in nearby Cumberland Valley.
Dee and Delta as the most likely repository of the Hicks family version of “The Turkish Factor,” a ballad known to the family
consistently as “The Turkey Factory.”
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Daniel (Dee's father) possessed a vast repertoire that he passed along to his eight children, four of whom -Joe, Nancy, Dee, and Bessford- kept the tradition alive. Although their father.
Dee and Delta Hicks received national recognition in the United States and Canada for their ballad singing, Dee's brother Joe was also a musician. Joe Hicks (b. 1899) and Dee Hicks (b. 1906), sons of Daniel Hicks, were born at the old Hicks
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Copied from WHAT A TIME! Southern Grassroots Music 1982
DEE AND DELTA HICKS BIOGRAPHY
Dee and Delta Hicks sing traditional Anglo-American Music, known as broadsides, ballads, or simply love songs. Many of these songs brought tot America by early English, Irish, and Scottish settlers, have been in Dee's family for at least four generations, passed on orally from father to son. Most are sung today as they were sung then. They tell of hunters and travelers, of betrayed love, of ghastly murder. The Hicks' repertoire of between 200 and 300 songs makes them one of the largest repositories in the country of traditional ballads.
Dee Hicks was born and raised in Fentress County, Tennessee. His great-grandfather taught songs to Joseph, his grandfather, who taught Daniel, Dee's father. Dee was 10 years old when his father taught him to
play banjo. He recalls, "I was little for my age and had to rest the end of
the banjo on the bed. Pretty quick, I commenced to singin'." His father
was "a mighty singer who knew more songs than anybody else in the county..
All the old people said he had a way, a curve at the end of a song that made
it near perfect. He was a good fiddler, too, and could sing and play
together. Not many could do that then."
On Saturday afternoons, father and son would go to town to pick up goods
for the farm which Daniel Hicks had settled shortly before Dee was born.
They would play banjo and fiddle in front of the general store and Daniel
would tell hunting stories. After they played, people would have Dee sing
for them.
Daniel Hicks made his living raising stock. Dee recalls a large farm with
over 100 head of sheep, almost as many hogs, and 15 to 20 head of cattle.
Times were never easy and the farm required constant work. Dee helped feed
the stock and plow the fields. "When I learned to plow," he recalls, "I was
small enough that I had to hold to the crosspiece between the handles."
There was little time for school.
Like many rural southerners, the Hicks supplemented their income by hunting
fur-bearing animals and trading the hides for goods. Dee learned to hunt
from his father. "I used to be an awful good fox hunter and my dad was
too..I took it up after him. I was the huntinest one of his boys and I love
that yet."
Dee met his wife, Delta (pronounced "Delty") Cunningham, when they were
children. Delta also grew up in Fentress County and spent some of her
younger years in neighboring Morgan County. Her mother was Dee's first
cousin. Her father worked in a saw-mill and then made railroad ties. When
she was 10 years old, Delta, eldest of the eight children, asked to help.
My dad was a poor man and a hard worker. When he went into tie-making, he
was having to chop his trees down, chop his ties, and saw 'em off himself.
One day, I said, "Dad, let me go help you." He said, "You can't. You're
too small." I said, "No, I ain't. I can help." So he let me go with him
and I helped him cut down his trees. I knowed how to saw. A crosscut saw
is long. He would push it through just far enough for me to pull and push,
my arms being short.When I was 12 years old, I could make a tie as quick as
Dad could."
By the time Delta was a teenager, she could shoulder and carry a railroad
tie.
Like Dee, Delta worked hard as a child. Play time was in the evenings or
on Sunday.
We'd play of a night when the moon would shine in the summer. We'd play
running around the house, whoopie-hide, drop-the-hankerchief, or
jump-the-rope or something in the yard. My brother and his wife, when they'
d come over on a Sunday, we'd play fox and hound. We'd cut up a whole lot
of paper and then me and his wife, Nancy, would be the fox. We'd take that
cut paper and go running and scatter it as we went. My brothers, Herbert
and Henry Sager, would be the hounds. They'd be behind and come running and
barking and following that paper. We'd just run and scatter that paper, go
up through the tree tops and out on the limbs and down and in under and gone
again. They'd come right on the way we went. They knowed where the paper
was scattered, where we went. We'd play that way."
When Dee was 21 and Delta was 17, they were married by a justice of the
peace. They began working together, clearing the land to build their home
with "axes and crosscut saw, the mules and an old bull tongue plow." They
shared the farm work, putting in and harvesting a crop each year. During
the "Hoover panic," times were especially difficult for the young couple.
Dee recalls, "It was bad to live. Me and her worked at whatever we could
get work at. In berry time we'd pick berries and sell. In the spring of
the year we'd peel bark, chinahaw,.stargrass, bluefoot, and witch hazel
bark." They traded the herbs and barks, and the furs they had hunted, to a
merchant who gave them credit for flour, seeds, and farm necessities.
Delta often took jobs considered men's work. She says, "Man's work's same
as anything else. It didn't make any difference." Dee recalls, "Me and her
worked in one mill for seven years, me handling the lumber and her working
the strips and slabs." When Dee enlisted in the Army in 1944, Delta plowed,
planted, and harvested their crops. Dee and Delta have never had much more
than a small piece of land, a hunting rifle, and a few dogs and farm
animals. Yet Dee says, "We've had a mighty happy married life for poor
people."
Music has always played a big part in their lives, Opportunities to hear
commercial singers were few. Dee never heard a radio until he was a grown
man. But the legacy of ballads his father gave to him kept Dee and Delta
singing at home and in the woods and fields. Dee continued playing his
banjo and became a fine fiddler. They shared songs like "Lather and Shave,"
"Will the Weaver," and "Lincoln Was a Union Man" with their daughters and
grandchildren and with neighbors in Tinchtown, Tennessee. They sang on
Sundays at the Freewill Baptist Church. In the 1960's, they began singing,
playing, and dancing at house parties. The old ballads they sang were a
link to their mothers and fathers, to faraway places in England and
Scotland, and to forgotten events in Kentucky or Arkansas.
In 1976, Dee and Delta Hicks were introduced by one of their grandchildren
to naturalist and folklorist Bobby Fulcher. Fulcher was learning banjo and
was interested in the old styles of playing. He began visiting regularly
and eventually recorded their large son repertoire for the Library of
Congress.
In 1978, the Hicks sang professionally for the first time at the 40th
National Folk Life Festival. Since then, they have sung at the Southern
Folk Cultural Revival Project's Tennessee Grassroots Days and at Canada's
Mariposa Folk Festival.
Dee and Delta Hicks want to bring their songs to more people. Dee says, "I
'd like for these songs to get out to the people because they're pretty and
there's not many people that knows them anymore." Delta points out, "We are
old now and disabled some. If people don't learn songs from the old people,
they'll be forgotten and gone." On stage, Dee, in his overalls with his
bright blue eyes, and Delta, short and robust, with golden hair and eyes of
brighter blue, sing unaccompanied in clear and cutting voices. The strong
and steadfast Hicks are making sure the songs they sing will never be
"forgotten and gone."
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Probably the last great traditional ballad singer in America, Johnny Ray Hicks, of Fentress County, TN, died on August 22, 2000. I recorded many of his songs, and even more from Dee Hicks, a cousin who died in 1983. The documented repertoire of early American and British folk songs from this family constitutes the largest such repertoire from any kin group in North America. Has anyone ever connected this group of Hicks to the Hicks of Beech Mountain, NC? Johnny Ray Hicks' grandfather, John Hicks, born 1843, gave an account, published in 1916, in which he stated his father, Joseph Hicks, was born on Sulfer Creek nine miles east of Burksville, KY, and came to TN in 1817; paternal grandparents were John Hicks and Chrissie (Mills) Hicks, and maternal grandparents were Wylie Downs and Chrissie (Nobles) Downs.
I found Wylie Downs in Pitt County, NC between 1816 and 1826, but no John Hicks. Any info on this John Hicks would be much appreciated. I am not related by blood or marriage, but am a committed admirer of the Hicks I have met in Tennessee, and really appreciate their contribution to the world as the last singers of many songs that were centuries old. Bob Fulcher:Fulcherrj@aol.com