Maria B. Hickey: A Local Face with Big Talent
Maria B. Hickey of Poughkeepsie spent her high school career doing what she loved; dancing in a ballet company. After years of practice and dedication to the art of dance, though, she realized that her heart and soul really lied elsewhere — in the world of singing.
Hickey grew up on the Poughkeepsie-Hyde Park border and danced her way through Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Hyde Park. At the time, she believed that this was the route she would pursue after graduation. Hickey opted to go to Dutchess Community College so she could focus most of her time and energy on dance. She picked up a job as a waitress, and began commuting to New York City where she would audition and take dance classes.
This decision was ultimately what put dance into the background and brought singing to the forefront of Hickey’s life.
“That’s where I learned that maybe I was a little bit of a big fish in a small pond in the dance world,” Hickey says. “It was really competitive and really hard. But I knew I loved theater, so then I started singing.”
With her dance-life at a halt, Hickey shifted her focus to her love of singing, which would eventually become a passion and a career for the mother of four. She comments that she wishes she had realized sooner, so she could have pursued singing throughout high school.
“I always loved to sing and imitate different artists, like Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon and Carole King. I loved to sing along but I didn’t think I was gifted by any means,” Hickey says.
Although she may not have realized her talent yet, her fellow Roosevelt High School classmates knew she was gifted.
“We used to wear Walkmans back then. I’d have mine on and I’d be singing along not realizing people were listening and they’d be like, ‘Wow, you really can sing!,” she recalls.
Despite not giving singing much thought as a teenager, she says that now, she regrets not doing more theater in high school, where she instead spent all of her time taking dance classes.
After deciding right after high school that the New York City dance scene was not for her, Hickey jumped right into the city’s singing scene, never allowing her decision to stop dancing deter her from making something of herself.
Almost immediately, Hickey began working with Robert Marks, a vocal coach in the city whose main goal is to prepare his clients for auditions by helping them to take an already-composed piece of music and make it his or her own.
Whenever Hickey had an audition coming up, she says, “He would give me a piece of music and my job would be to go home and take the piece and apply the lyrics to my life, so that when I sang the song it was coming from my heart.”
She explains Marks’ theory that, “a lot of people can sing,” so it isn’t always enough to go to an audition and sing a song that won’t set you apart from your competition.
Hickey continues, “When you walk into an audition, you want to move [the judges]. You want to make them think, ‘Wow.’ You want to make them believe what you’re saying. Because a lot of theater music is a story. That was challenging and that was hard.”
Marks challenged Hickey to be the best vocalist she could, while still allowing her to go down the path she wanted and live the life she dreamed of. He knew she eventually wanted to get married and start a family, and that she would take a path different from many singers. With this knowledge, Marks helped her to build her repertoire of jazz standards, which Hickey feels really helped her balance her career and her personal life.
“I’ve been able to work a lot because of that,” she says. “I do a lot of duo gigs and things at restaurants where I sing the old jazz standards and that kind of stuff.”
Hickey explains that part of the reason why Marks pushed her toward jazz was due to her tendency to imitate other singers. The two noticed that while she was learning different theater songs, she would imitate the original artist, whereas Marks preferred that she make the songs her own.
Because most jazz standards were sung by men, Hickey says, “I had no choice but to make it my own and create my own interpretation of the song, so that was huge for me.”
This ability to personalize the music made jazz one of Hickey’s favorite genres to perform. She dabbles in a variety of genres, including jazz, R&B, classic rock, rock, pop and theater. Her heart, however, lies with jazz and theater, where she can tell stories and make the songs her own.
Throughout her singing career, Hickey has been a part of a number of singing groups and bands. She sang for Silk’n Sounds from 1990 to around 1997, then started her own band, the Maria B. Hickey Band, which lasted until 2001 when her first child was born. After a two-year break, Hickey began working with The Michael Dell Orchestra and has been with him ever since.
Over the past 26 years or so, Hickey feels lucky to have performed with big names such as Ira Coleman, Sting’s bass player and Fred Maxwell who plays the trumpet for Alicia Keys. She is also proud of her theatrical work in plays including Jekyll and Hyde, Chicago, Cabaret, Tommy, and The Full Monty.
While Hickey has sung in venues all over the tri-state area, from New York City and the Hamptons to New Jersey and Connecticut, she comments that she has a strong tie to Poughkeepsie and the surrounding areas, which she also performs in regularly.
“My family is still here- my youngest children, my husband, my parents,” she says. “I’ve had opportunities to move with my husband’s work but I like being near the city and near my family. I love New York and the changing seasons, too.”
Hickey hopes that in four years when her youngest child graduates high school and goes off to college, she can make her way back to New York City.
“I’m considering trying to audition for theater again in the city… on Broadway,” she says. “I’m thinking big. That’s where I was before so I want to come full-circle. I had my children relatively young. I’m still young enough to get in the game.”
She lightheartedly jokes, though, that if she makes it into the Broadway scene, the roles she would play now are different than those she played before she had her children.
“I mean the roles change, I’m not going to be the young girl anymore. I’ll be the mother but that’s okay,” she says with a laugh.
