On Being a Friend to a Star!
It's with a heavy heart this evening that I sit to put thoughts on paper regarding some very unsettling and down right tragic news of a highly revered local Georgia musician. Any details of the situation are most entirely unknown to me as I am simply going upon a brief text message that I received from a beloved friend which simply read RIP Danny.
When I saw the message late on Saturday afternoon, my mind diverted from the most plausible implication of the text because surely what I thought this might mean just couldn’t be true. Danny Hutchens, the prolific musician, songwriter of upwards of three hundred original songs, the southern, peacekeeping yet rowdy romper who seemed to often typify what it means to be a shabby, self-guided genius always wearing their heart on the sleeve. No surely it wasn’t that Danny whom the message implicated as having just succumbed to mortality.
The Danny I know is aware of his own mortality but while maintaining an overflowing level of talent and artistry that he continues so generously offering to fans and anyone who is lucky enough to discover him. The Danny I know just finished the recording of an amazing new album in Nashville titled ‘Black Market Tango’ alongside his Athens based band Bloodkin, for whom he is the front man in addition to his childhood friend Eric Carter on lead guitar as well as their long-time bassist and drummer.
Lastly, the Danny I know helped steer many adoring fans through the darkest days of the Covid pandemic by hosting a once or twice weekly live stream, playing via Facebook from his home music room. Nearly without fail each Wednesday and Saturday night one could listen to him perform his repertoire of nearly countless songs on acoustic and electric guitar.
He even began a thematic archiving project to his streams where he set out on a mission to play every song that he’d ever written throughout his storied thirty-year career. This involved playing the hits, the b-sider tracks but also uncovering many nearly lost,unrecorded songs which at some point had been part of the Bloodkin repertoire many years ago. Additionally, during this quest, he claimed to have rummaged through old notebooks containing scribbled lyrics or shoeboxes of cassette tapes containing recordings from the 80’s and 90’s so that we may all be acquainted with this original music during his weekly steams as he also humbly documented his life’s work.
The total count of original songs that he performed over these several-month period was over three hundred. That is an incredible amount of music to not only be able to play, but to have originally written 
and to then re-transcribe during the pandemic induced lock down times of uncertainty and strain for so many of us and while being a father.Of these hundreds of songs, I might also add, none of them are glossy show pieces or insignificant ditties. No each one of his works, possesses a depth of rigidity, truthfulness, grit and poetry that we all know to expect from Mr. Daniel Hutchins..
If what I think to be true dear friend, I certainly am most saddened. It is your shows that so many of us were most excited about in hopes of a return to our days of former normalcy.