‘A driving force’ - Patricia (Hodgden) McAllister raised in Missouri music family, performed in successful bands

Patricia (Hodgden) McAllister, seated, is pictured in the mid-1970s with her first rock band, Thrush. She grew up in a musical family of three brothers who went on to perform with renowned groups such as Missouri and Shooting Star. McAllister credits her parents’ support in the success of their bands. Courtesy of Patricia McAllister

Growing up in the household as the only daughter and youngest child of Glen and DeLouris Hodgden, Patricia (Hodgden) McAllister recalls music always being present in her life. Her three older brothers went on to have their own bands and experienced a level of musical acclaim, thus inspiring her at a young age to pursue her own career as an artist.
 
“I was raised in south Kansas City and my grandmother was a church organist and taught piano as well,” Patricia McAllister recalled. “I was about five-year-old when I started learning piano and my brother Ron, who was twelve years older than me, was always in the basement rehearsing with his band.”

When she was ten years old, she began playing organ and piano for funerals, weddings, and other events. By the time she was thirteen, she was performing as a solo act in local coffee shops.
 
Days around the Hodgden home were often frenetic, she recalled, since her father operated a contract delivery route for the Kansas City Star and there were frequent guests coming and going to either play with or observe Chesmann Square, the band formed by her older brothers.
 
“I started with the band Thrush when I was fifteen years old and was their lead singer all through high school,” she recalled. “Ron had been with his band Chesmann Square for about ten years and when they broke up, he came and played guitar for Thrush for the last year and a half we were together, until he started the Missouri band.
 
Graduating from Center Senior High School in 1975, Thrush broke up the following year. She helped form another band, this one called the Nice Guys, and performed with them for about three years. When this group broke up around 1980, Patricia was hired to work at the studio owned by Randy Bachman of the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO).
 
“Shooting Star, which was a band my brother Gary was with, had recorded an album in Bachman’s studio and their sound guy went to work for the studio,” she said. “He ended up contacting me and asking if I wanted to come up there and work for them.”
 
Patricia accepted the job and lived for about a year-and-a-half at the studio in Lynden, Washington, situated along the Canadian border. She worked as a bookkeeper and hostess, assisting bands who came to record at the studio, in addition to occasionally playing piano for Bachman during live performances. For a brief period, she lived in San Francisco and flew to the studio in Washington whenever a band was booked to record there. But in 1982, she decided to return to Kansas City and, the following year, she and her husband became parents to a son.
 
“Whenever I had time, I was practicing piano by myself and then got in a band called Hush Hush,” she explained. “I played with them for about three years …,” she paused, adding with a smile, “and it seems like I stayed with everything for about three years back then!” She added, “We performed in local clubs, during concerts hosted by the Crown Center in downtown Kansas City and even in Jefferson City, but we only worked about four times a month. Years earlier when I was playing with Thrush, we never had a weekend off, it seemed.”
 
In 1991, she gave birth to her second son and, after divorcing, married Jim McAllister in 1992. She had come to know McAllister many years earlier when he played lead guitar with her brother in Chesmann Square. McAllister’s husband worked for several years writing and composing jingles to be used for area marketing ads while Patricia sang or spoke the vocal accompaniment. She also worked at Superior Sound in the early 1990s—a company that rented, sold, and installed PA systems.
 
“There came a point when I wanted to make a little more money, so I decided to return to school and earn my degree,” she explained. “I began taking classes at UMKC but eventually earned my bachelor’s in accounting in 1995 from DeVry University.”
 
Now busy with her career, she stepped away from performing with bands and worked briefly in the business office of a local college. Then, her husband, who was operating a business established with his father to export surgical instruments to Japan, became her new focus and she began to do the bookkeeping.
 
Patricia gave birth to her third and final son in 2001. Five years later, her husband passed away and soon their once thriving export business collapsed after changes to customs laws and regulations. More recent years, she frankly remarked, have been invested in addressing personal health issues.
 
McAllister’s youth was filled with many endearing musical experiences and successes while her brothers also enjoyed their own achievements in recording and performing. But she acknowledges that none of this would have come to fruition without the support of their parents.
 
“My father worked hard but in his rare moments of spare time, helped fix and maintain the buses and vans that my brothers used to travel to their gigs,” she said. “And our mother, she essentially worked as a booking agent finding the venues and places for us to perform.
 
“And in those later years,” she added, “after having my first child, my mother helped watch my son since I was going to college, working and performing in a band—it was quite a busy time. But again, mother was a driving force behind our music, and she did everything she could to back our bands.”
 
Jeremy P. Ämick is the author of "Movin' On," biography of the rock band Missouri.   

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This promo shot was taken for McAllister’s second band, the Nice Guys. She later became the vocalist and pianist for the group Hush Hush before leaving the music scene. Courtesy of Patricia McAllister