About Folk Funk

Traditional folk music is often structured in the I-IV-V format such as playing C-F-G or G-C-D major chord progressions. Folk Funk is all about using seventh and ninth chords in place of and in addition to major chords such as C7-F7-G7 or G9-C7-D7 chord progressions.

About G. Hicks

G. Hicks fuses traditional folk, blues, and ragtime idioms with modern funk sounds to create his own self-dubbed genre of music called Folk Funk.

G. Hicks was born and raised in Michigan, lived in Boston during his college years, and now resides in San Francisco. While living in Boston, he became friends with 'Guitar' Rob. They hung out listening to early American music as well as classic rock albums and jamming out in many a music session. To this day, they continue to collaborate on music recordings as R&G.

Though G. Hicks is of the folk tradition in learning songs by ear rather than from written sheet music, he attributes learning music theory as invaluable to understanding the structure of music.

In addition to playing music, he immersed himself in reading a vast collection of music biographies. He read biographies about ragtime era musicians from the 1890s and early 1900s like Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and James P. Johnson. He was fascinated with the lives of blind, black blues guitar players from the 1920s and 1930s like Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, and Reverend Gary Davis. He relished in jug band music coming out of Memphis in the 1920s and 1930s like (Gus) Cannon's Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band. He idolized the stories of folk musicians from the 1930s and 1940s like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Sonny Terry. It was reading about the lives of all these musical icons that enriched his desire to play music.

Today G. Hicks can be found putting on music shows locally in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco as well as collaborating on music recordings with Guitar Rob. Listen to R&G Jukebox on this site and come check out a Folk Funk Music Show!