Composer ("Rose Room") and one of the first ever musicians to organise a professional dance band, as early as 1913 in San Francisco. His orchestra was based at the St. Francis Hotel. In 1919, it so impressed Florenz Ziegfeld, who was in the audience, that he hired the Hickman band for the entire 1920 run of the Follies. Hickman subsequently returned to the West Coast to lead the group at the Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador Hotel and the Biltmore. By the end of the decade, he had turned over the reigns of the band to Frank Ellis. Hickman died, relatively young, in 1930.
