Earl Klugh started on piano at six, in Detroit, and switched to guitar at ten. At thirteen he saw Chet Atkins play on the Perry Como Show and it reset his sense of what the instrument could do — he later became a guest performer on several of Atkins' own albums and worked with him on television, including appearances on Hee Haw. Detroit itself did a lot of the teaching: working in a local music shop and spending time at the city's storied Baker's Keyboard Lounge put him in the same rooms as Bill Evans, Yusef Lateef, and Chick Corea while he was still a teenager.

His first recording credit came at fifteen, playing on Yusef Lateef's Suite 16 (1970) — real jazz pedigree, well before any pop crossover entered the picture. A few years later he appeared on George Benson's White Rabbit (recorded November 1971, released 1972 on CTI) and joined Benson's touring band in 1973; Benson became his first real mentor and helped him land his first record deal. That same general period, 1974, he passed briefly through Chick Corea's Return to Forever. Two guitarists, two very different directions, one young player who'd touched both before he turned twenty-one. His own debut as a leader, the self-titled Earl Klugh, came out in 1976 on Blue Note.

The connection that matters most for crossover jazz came in 1979: Klugh teamed with keyboardist Bob James for One on One, which won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance at the 1981 ceremony and went gold. They followed it with Two of a Kind (1982) and Cool (1992), a three-album partnership stretched across thirteen years and two different decades of smooth jazz's commercial life. Klugh paired off with another guitarist, George Benson, for Collaboration (1987, Warner Bros.), and separately recorded a duo album with Japanese guitarist Hiroki Miyano, Hotel California (billed as Super Guitar Duo Featuring Hiroki Miyano, 1983, Philips, Japan-only release).

Klugh's own catalog runs deep on its own terms: more than 30 studio albums across Blue Note/EMI, Capitol, Warner Bros., BMG, Koch, and Heads Up, with dozens of Billboard Jazz Albums chart entries and one Grammy win against thirteen nominations. His most recent studio album, HandPicked (2013, Heads Up), found him recording acoustic duets with guitarists including Bill Frisell and Vince Gill. As of 2025 he was still performing, including at the annual "Weekend of Jazz" events he hosts at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.

Klugh built his sound around a warm, fingerstyle acoustic guitar tone, closer in spirit to Chet Atkins' country-fingerpicking clarity than to the amplified, single-note lines of jazz guitarists like Benson or Corea's fusion-era band. That's the throughline from his teenage fascination with Atkins on television to a career spent almost entirely on nylon or steel-string acoustic rather than the electric guitar most of his jazz-fusion peers favored. His writing sits comfortably in melodic, radio-friendly territory — the instinct that made the Bob James pairings work so well — while his Detroit apprenticeship under Benson, and brief pass through Corea's Return to Forever, kept a harder jazz vocabulary underneath the smooth-jazz surface.