A legendary figure in Bluegrass and country music, the fiddle master Bobby Hicks died at his home in western North Carolina from complications of heart disease at the age of 91.
Long revered as a legendary figure in the world of American Bluegrass, Robert Caldwell ‘Bobby’ Hicks died on 16 August at home in his native North Carolina. His death was announced on Facebook by fellow musicians Mark O’Connor and Lincoln Hensley.
Within hours of the news of his death, condolences were shared widely on social media by generations of renowned musicians who had known and worked with Hicks. Many emphasised his loyalty and generosity as a friend along with his indelible musical legacy.
‘Bluegrass music’s greatest fiddler’ in the words of Lincoln Hensley, Hicks was born on 21 July 1933 in Newton in the piedmont region of western North Carolina. He grew up in a musical family that played traditional mountain music and initially learned mandolin and guitar, taking up the fiddle around the age of nine.
Never taking formal music lessons, Hicks recalled absorbing what he could from listening to records and watching other musicians. The prodigy also learned from playing square dances and in just a few years won first place in the North Carolina State Championship.
Hicks started performing as a professional in 1953 and attracted the attention of singer-songwriter and mandolinist Bill Monroe, the so-called ‘father of Bluegrass’. Monroe initially hired Hicks to play bass for his band, the Bluegrass Boys, but made him fiddler when he heard the scope of his musicianship. They collaborated and recorded songs throughout the 1950s and later reunited in the 1980s.
According to Bluegrass Today, Hicks’s fiddle work can be heard prominently on Monroe’s epochal Bluegrass Instrumentals (later released in 1965). He also played with country singers Porter Wagoner in Nashville and Judy Lynn in Las Vegas.
After a period back home in North Carolina, Hicks in 1981 began a long-lasting collaboration with Ricky Skaggs, a powerful force in American neotraditional country and Bluegrass. He toured with Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder for nearly a quarter century.
Hicks won ten Grammy Awards and reigned for half a century as a familiar figure at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. In 2017, he was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Noted Bluegrass historian and journalist Gary Reid, Hicks was ‘a supreme fiddler, still at the top of his game as he enter[ed] his seventh decade of performing’.
Lincoln Hensley praised Hicks for his mastery of ‘fiddle tone, pulling a bow, playing double stops, arranging harmony, singing a classic country song, telling a great joke, etc.’ and added that ‘he was also the greatest at being a friend to those he loved’.
‘Perhaps thousands of fiddlers and violinists learned knee to knee from this legend’, wrote Mark O’Connor wrote in his Facebook post. For O’Connor, the legendary musician stood out as ‘an innovator, a fiddling creative master’, and a virtuoso of ‘double-stop waltzes’. Hicks also kept forever young be being ‘always curious and lov[ing to be] around players who were different than he was’. He was still performing up to a few weeks before his death.
Noting that Hicks could also be ‘a fine singer and a top-notch banjo player’, Bluegrass Today reported that his widow Cathy was planning a private service, ‘after which Bobby’s ashes will be scattered among the mountains where they live’, with a public celebration of life to be announced at a later date.
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