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1954 — 2017
The drummer who held the scene: The documented center of South Bend's mid-century Black music scene, at the size the surviving record supports, is a drummer. Billy "Stix" Nicks was born in Mississippi in 1934 to a sharecropping family and came to South Bend; the jazz organist Jackie Ivory — the other pole of the circle — gave him his nickname, because he carried his drumsticks everywhere. By 1954 Nicks was playing professionally. He formed the Blue Notes, then Billy "Stix" Nicks and His Rhythm Rockers, the band in which the city's R&B sound was worked out. The Rhythm Rockers held a regular Saturday show on WNDU television in South Bend in the mid-1950s — network-affiliate television exposure for a local Black band in that decade, stated plainly because the record states it.
Nicks's Army service in Europe interrupts the local line, and the record gives his return two ways: the Tribune's account has him back in South Bend in 1959; the University of Notre Dame's account of the circle has him returning in 1962 to play jazz with Jackie Ivory. Both dates are printed as their sources give them. What followed is documented: Nicks toured with Ivory in the early 1960s and played on Ivory's recording Soul Discovery in 1965 (the Notre Dame account describes the Ivory work as recording for Atlantic Records, and the label attribution is printed as that account's). Ivory's own biography beyond this circle was not established in the record reached — he is not the organist Jackie Davis of Jacksonville, and not Ivory Joe Hunter, and he is printed here at the size the South Bend record gives him, as the scene's keyboardist and the man who named its drummer.
Nicks's ending is a matter of civic record: he was inducted into the South Bend Community Hall of Fame on November 14, 2017, and he died the next day, aged 82 — the Tribune prints his birth year as 1934 and his age at death as 82, and both figures are carried here exactly as the paper states them. The clubs this circle played stand in the Bars and Nightclubs record; the documentary thinness of the city's club-era record is named in the note to this section, not filled here.
Sources:
- George Garner (IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center), South Bend Tribune opinion column, February 5, 2026 — Nicks born in Mississippi in 1934; the "Stix" nickname from Jackie Ivory; professional by 1954; the Blue Notes and the Rhythm Rockers; the return in 1959; touring with Ivory and Soul Discovery (1965); the Hall of Fame induction of November 14, 2017, and death the next day aged 82.
- Eugene Halton, University of Notre Dame page on the Walker–Nicks circle — the WNDU Saturday television show of the mid-1950s; the 1962 return to play jazz with Ivory; the Atlantic recording attribution.
- Halls of Fame section of this history — the South Bend Community Hall of Fame, in whose 2017 class Nicks stands.