The Acton Harmonica Player - Pat "Hatrack" Gallagher

A regular monthly host at our Thursday night Blues Jam, harmonica player and singer, Pat "Hatrack" Gallagher, leads the opening set with pianist Ric Maure, bassist Jim Guttman, and drummer Mickey Carter, before turning over the stage to jammers.

He’s also a regular Sunday Jazz Jam patron and participant. Vocalists and instrumentalists love to trade lines with Hatrack, and, in these situations, he is often invited up to the stage before he has his first sip of ginger ale.

Hatrack’s voice, when singing and telling a story, is country. He has lived in Acton for 26 years “on a quarter acre—can you imagine that?” he says, adding that his property boarders on conservation land, so he can look out from his back door “and imagine it’s all mine…”

Born in 1949, Patrick Gallagher was raised and schooled in Lexington before heading out west for awhile, then living for extended times in Maine, New Hampshire, and Gardner, MA, before settling here in Acton. He says that he’s had the nickname “Hatrack” for 40 years.

“People told me, ‘why don’t you learn to use your head for something other than a hat rack?’ and I guess you can see what happened, because the name just took,” he said.

He often comes in with his charming 24-year old daughter, Morgan.

He has also raised two other daughters in our town: Erin, 26, now an EMT in Lawrence, and Leddy, 19, a varsity field hockey player at Keene State.

His first musical hero was his uncle, trumpet player Edward “The Candyman” Candioto. Ed worked at a bronze factory in Western Pennsylvania by day and was a union horn player by night.

“People tell me that when I was one year old, I’d just sit and watch him practicing …and, I mean, I was wide-eyed,” he said.

Hatrack took up harmonica playing more than 50 years ago.

“I come to music from the blues,” he says. “My taste in jazz goes to the blues. Louis Armstrong: he’s my main guy…that seminal stuff; hot fives, hot sevens. You know, that desert island question? Those are the recordings I would take with me.”

“But, you know, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young: these guys were great blues players. No matter how rich and complicated the lines get, the blues is still at the heart of it. That’s my thing.”

Hatrack’s main instrument is a C chromatic harmonica. It has three octaves of the major scale in the key of C, and a slide raises each tone by ½ step, so all 12 tones in the octave are available. Here at The Acton Jazz Café, we’ve heard him use them all.

When asked about the café, he says, “I feel really lucky to have a place like that. 1): AT ALL. And 2): in my home town!”

When asked to list his favorite tunes, he says, “my one all-time favorite has to be Stardust. It was my grandmother’s favorite song. I guess I’m a sentimental fool, but that one song really fills the bill.”