Brock,
Reading and watching your latest guitar thread I couldn't help thinking of Craven County guitarist Pete Huttllinger. He's probably the most famous guitarist most folks never heard of. Reason being that he primarily works as a studio guitarist in Nashville and plays acoustic guitar. I knew of Pete when I attended Craven Community college many years ago. I can't call him a friend. I never hung around him but saw him on campus all the time, usually with a group of cute ladies hanging around him. There is some story about him and (I think it was) Les Paul that I want to tell you but I can't quite remember the details. I'll get back to you if I do. Seems he was the only person that Paul or whomever the artist was, would allow to play a particular arrangement that he had written.
I'm much more into electric guitar music but Pete is great! He was having some health problems a while back. Don't know what his status is now.
Charlie
I love the complexity of what Pete can do with the guitar - Eleanor Rigby is just beautiful... here is a little ditty that Stevie Wonder wrote about his new baby girl:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlneCJo5kHw#t=78
Just about perfect. Thanks.
DeleteI just got this information from Wikipedia on Pete's health issues - he has been through the mill:
ReplyDeleteIn November 2010 Huttlinger suffered a near fatal stroke. He was paralyzed on his right side and could not speak. Exerting enormous effort, he slowly pushed back the paralysis and was even playing guitar again when he was devastated by end-stage heart failure, the result of a cardiac abnormality that had plagued him since childhood. So serious was the affliction that he had to be air-lifted from Vanderbilt Hospital, near his home in Nashville, to Texas Heart Institute in Houston, where he was outfitted with a heart pump known as a VAD (Ventricular Assist Device) and spent the next four months in the hospital recovering. In 2013 he released the long-awaited McGuire's Landing Project during a house concert on his birthday in Baltimore, Maryland.
Here's two that Charlie (comment below) sent me earlier and I neglected to post:
DeleteInterview
http://www.vintageguitar.com/2928/pete-huttlinger/
Health problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykduW2v73tk#t=24
Brock, reading further online after writing to you, I now realize that Pete was only in Craven Co. for a few years. I guess I was lucky to have crossed paths with him and unlucky in that I didn't take the time to get to know him. In the last few years he's had a stroke and then heart failure but thanks to great doctors and the good Lord he seems to be doing well and is back at work and trying to regain the guitar licks he lost in a year or so of not being able to play.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason to be thankful for our own health. I should have been killed numerous times in my life, but fortunately am still alive and kicking! :)
Delete