Rick Fitzgerald is an accomplished guitarist and vocalist, but he is probably best known as an autoharp player. He taught himself to play the guitar in 1973, listening to John Denver and Leo Kottke records. He took up the autoharp in 1977 after seeing Bryan Bowers play at the Blue River Café, a local Folk Club in Milwaukee.

Rick describes his diatonic autoharps as the “turbo-charged sports cars of the autoharp world,” and uses a free-flowing, five-fingered picking style to deliver expressive melodies with interwoven harmonies. He is currently on the board of directors for the Mountain Laurel Autoharp Gathering and chairman of the Make Our Own (MOO) Music Gathering, and of course is a perennial favorite on The Coffee House stage.