He was known for being honest and helpful in his dealings, and knowledgeable and innovative in his work. He had, as many who knew him would attest, a crusty sense of humor and a sometimes gruff demeanor, but he was also generous, likeable and unassuming.
Walter was born in 1939 in Houston, where he lived with his family through high school. His earliest musical influences, as he later recounted, came from his participation in junior high and high school band programs. His first instrument was the cornet, but at the suggestion of his music teacher he switched to sousaphone. To his teacher’s surprise, and perhaps his own, Walter virtually taught himself to play the sousaphone, figuring it out as he went along and displaying a natural ear for music, which became one of the hallmarks of his career.
After high school, Walter received a scholarship to study music at Southwest Texas State College (now Texas State). After graduating he took a job at a music store in San Marcos. Though he initially worked as a salesman, customers soon began asking for his help in repairing their instruments. In this way, starting with basic techniques, but largely teaching himself, he began his career as an instrument repair technician.
In 1964 he moved to Austin and opened his first store, Walter’s Music. In 1969, while working on his boat on Lake Austin, he fell and broke his back, and was forced to close his store. While he was recuperating, Dan Strait of Strait Music invited him to work at Strait until he was once again able to reopen his store. Walter then went to work as a guitar tech at Strait, where he stayed for 12 years.
Walter’s tenure at Strait Music coincided with the explosion of Austin music, jazz included, in the 1970s. He was in the right place at the right time with the right skills to serve the city’s ever-expanding population of professional and aspiring musicians. As he developed his proficiency in the care and repair of instruments, his reputation spread throughout the music community. His guitar repair techniques were admired for their inventiveness and originality. He became knowledgeable in the repair of bass amps and developed unique ways to string guitars. Over time he became a source of advice and encouragement, especially to young musicians.
To jazz musicians in particular, Walter provided a specialized service. During his years at Strait he was the sole contact in town for obtaining copies of the Real Book, an invaluable but uncopyrighted compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards. Created in the early 1970s by anonymous students (still unknown to this day!) from Boston’s Berklee College of Music, the Real Book was for many years sold surreptitiously, literally under the counter, in music outlets throughout the county. How Walter became Austin’s only distributor of the Real Book is lost to history, but making it accessible to jazz musicians literally changed the face of Austin jazz, starting in the mid-1970s.
In 1981, Walter left Strait Music and opened his second store, Walter Hutcherson’s Musical Exchange, which he operated until 2015 when he sold it literally with just a handshake to trusted, longtime employees. Afterwards, Walter formally retired, but continued working at the store part-time. When the store closed for good during the pandemic, Walter worked independently, repairing instruments and amps, designing and building custom basses, and helping those who came to him by word of mouth.
Throughout his career, Walter was an active musician, playing banjo, tuba and bass, and leading bands or working as a sideman. As he described it later in his life, he played almost every kind of gig under the sun from weddings, celebrations, and private parties to clubs, dancehalls, resorts and hotels, and shopping centers. He was also a gifted woodworker and craftsman. Starting in the 1970s, he designed and built beautiful handmade speakers. He’d cut wood, construct cabinets, cover them with vinyl, make grill covers, and then wire and install speakers. These became locally famous and were known as Walter Boxes.
In 2024 Walter Hutcherson passed away at age 85. In retrospect, his career embodied the close, even familial relationship that flourishes in Austin between musicians, on the one hand, and music stores (such as Strait or Walter’s own), and those who dedicate themselves to the maintenance of musical instruments, on the other.
Towards the end of his life, Walter remembered how, years before, parents of young people with musical inclinations used to drop their children off on weekends at Strait Music or his own store, and leave them there while they went shopping. At such times, he said, the stores would be like daycare centers where young people, pre-teens and early teens, were free to explore their interests, discover and play instruments, and experience the world of music that surrounded them. Two young men Walter recalled from those days were Eric Johnson and Tommy Taylor, who both went on to achieve musical acclaim.
Walter once said that literally the day after he graduated from college he began working in music, and after that he never had to look for a job again. Work in music had a way of finding him. He said he never worked a day in his life that he wasn’t excited about his work, so it comes as no surprise that Austin musicians far and wide came to think of him, over the years, as a music man. And that is a music industry achievement.