Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers and Spade Cooley and Hank Garland and the Boswell Sisters and Stuff Smith and Bing Crosby all swing.

Taking up the guitar in 1959, he became part of the American folk music revival scene during his undergraduate studies, often dropping out intermittently to perform at venues across the United States.

Strongly influenced by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, he would cultivate friendships with several of the group's members (most notably Maria Muldaur) later in life.

After the band failed to secure a long-term recording contract, he switched to rhythm guitar in 1967 and briefly performed his original material as the group's frontman before leaving in 1968.

In 1968, LaFlamme left to form It's a Beautiful Day and was replaced by jazz violinist and fellow Santa Rosan "Symphony" Sid Page.

Following several lineup changes, vocalists Sherry Snow and Christine Gancher, guitarist Jon Weber, and bassist Jaime Leopold filled out the band, which had no drummer.

Hicks is delicate, tuneful, and droll, with an ear for colloquial history in words and music both, but he's so diffident about focus that his mock nostalgia is too easy to mistake for the right thing."

When Hicks reformed the band, Page and Leopold remained, and vocalists Naomi Ruth Eisenberg and Maryann Price joined, followed later by guitarist John Girton and drummer Bob Scott.

I was pretty disillusioned, had some money, and didn’t want to do it any more.”[7] Over the next decade, Hicks seldom recorded while subsisting on Hot Licks royalties in his adopted hometown of Mill Valley, California.

Envisaged as the soundtrack for an early iteration of Ralph Bakshi's Hey Good Lookin' (1982), the acclaimed It Happened One Bite was released as Hicks' first solo album by Warner Bros. Records in 1978; however, it only managed to peak at #155 in Billboard.

The program also featured Hicks' new group, The Acoustic Warriors, a combination of folk, swing, jazz and country which included Brian Godchaux on violin and mandolin, Paul "Pazzo" Mehling on guitar, and Richard Saunders on bass.

[10] In 1993, the Acoustic Warriors continued to perform locally around San Francisco and on the road, but this edition placed Paul Robinson on guitar, Nils Molin or Alex Baum on string bass, Stevie Blacke on mandolin and Josh Riskin on drums.

Recorded live at McCabe's in Santa Monica, it featured Jim Boggio on accordion/piano, Stevie Blacke on mandolin/violin, Paul Robinson on guitar, Alex Baum on bass and former Hot Lick Bob Scott on drums.

Beginning with Beatin’ the Heat (featuring Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bette Midler, Ricki Lee Jones and Brian Setzer) in 2000, Hicks returned to releasing albums with a reconstituted lineup of the Hot Licks on Surfdog Records.