Pete Huttlinger established himself during the early 1990s as a Nashville-based guitarist who balanced session work, sideman roles, teaching, and independent releases. He served as John Denver’s touring guitarist through the performer’s final period, after which he redirected his efforts toward music instruction and issued multiple solo guitar projects that highlighted his command of numerous styles. A stroke in 2010 interrupted his activities, yet he recovered sufficiently to complete additional recordings and a memoir before a second stroke ended his life in early 2016.
Born in Washington, D.C., Huttlinger first picked up the guitar during his early teenage years. After finishing high school he received a modest inheritance from a family member and applied the funds toward formal study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he concentrated on music and theory. Once he moved to Nashville he worked steadily as a session musician until Denver’s touring manager, Kris O’Connor, heard a recording from another project and invited him to join the band. Huttlinger stayed with Denver until the singer’s death in 1997. Shortly afterward he stepped away from regular session duties to produce instructional guitar videos and to begin releasing his own solo albums. The first of these, the 2002 instrumental set Naked Pop, presented his arrangements of pop material; subsequent releases explored guitar-centered interpretations across pop, jazz, folk, and Celtic idioms.
In 2010 Huttlinger endured a near-fatal stroke. He gradually regained strength and, over the following years, wrote and recorded the 2013 album McGuire’s Landing. The next year he joined his wife, Erin Morris Huttlinger, in authoring the memoir Joined at the Heart, which recounted both his musical path and the couple’s shared experience after the stroke. Also in 2015 he teamed with former John Denver band member Mollie Weaver to form the duo Parnassus, which issued two albums, one of them the holiday collection Christmas Time. That project proved to be his last; a second stroke claimed his life in Nashville on January 15, 2016, when he was 54.
