Click “Play” below to listen to Frank and Joe’s music while you read their bios.
Above is “Gonna Sit Right Down & Write Myself a Letter” – recorded in the Wild Blue Yonder Nightclub in the mid 1980’s.
Frank Hicks
Frank Hicks, who some consider to be one of the finest rhythm guitar players of his era, was born in Fresno in 1922 and began playing guitar when he was six years old. He took a few lessons but mainly played be ear. If he heard a tune a couple of times he could play it. He began playing for old-time dances when he was 11 and was sitting in with the larger bands at 14.
Frank was 19 when WWII broke out. Unable to enlist because of a pre-existing health condition, he started playing USO shows and then joined a western swing type band that played up and down the Valley. That’s how he met fellow 2026 Inductee, swing fiddler Joe Holley, who was playing with Bob Will’s and the Texas Playboys. The two became good friends and played music together as often as possible, including a stint together in The Playboys.
In the 1960s, Frank discovered Sweet’s Mill, the annual folk music festival held in Auberry, CA, and fell in love with it. He’d grown tired of the professional music scene and stepped away from it. Sweet’s Mill reinvigorated him. The people, the potlucks, and the late-night jam sessions all renewed his musical spirit and he became a regular.
That experience inspired him to join up with other Sweet’s Mill regulars, including Valley Music Hall of Fame inductee Kenny Hall, to form the popular bluegrass band, Sweet’s Mill Mountain Boys, who toured throughout California.
Frank died in 1995 at age 73.
Joe Holley
Joe Holley was born on a farm in West Texas in 1917. He was left-handed and started playing a right-handed fiddle backwards at age 11. He worked the farm during the day and played fiddle at night. He played his first country dance at 13.
In 1941 at age 24, he joined Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys band and helped make history in American music, delighting crowds with energy and his unique left- handed country swing fiddling. Joe Holley played fiddle with Bob Wills longer, and traveled more miles, than any other Texas Playboy fiddler, playing to sold out audiences all over the country. They were known for their superb instrumental work.
In 1945, Wills’ dances were drawing larger crowds than dances put on by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. Holley was inducted into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame in 1984, and The National Fiddler Hall of Fame in 2016. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, along with Joe Holley, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
Holley had settled in Fresno in 1945 with his wife, who he met at a Bob Wills dance in LA and married in Tijuana in 1944. He bought a mom-and-pop meat market and semi-retired from the Bob Wills Band, although he would still occasionally sit-in with them, and in 1978 played fiddle on the Bob Wills Reunion album, which was considered one of the greatest western swing albums ever recorded.
Here in Fresno, Joe would also get together with Frank Hicks and other local musicians for some fun jam sessions. In 1982 Joe, Frank and good friend Paul Anastasio recorded the album, “We Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
Holley died in Fresno in 1987 at age 70.