Peter White was born in Luton, England, on September 20, 1954, to an English father, Kenneth, and a French mother, Gilberte, and grew up in the nearby town of Letchworth Garden City. His father taught him to read music and to play recorder and piano, then coached him on clarinet, cornet and trombone, and in the mid-1960s he played in the Letchworth Town Brass Band. The guitar he taught himself. He has said he started on a steel-string acoustic around 1963 and has never had a guitar lesson. After hearing Jimi Hendrix in 1967 he asked for an electric guitar, and the one he got in 1968 was destroyed in a fire set by his younger brother Danny. The loss sent him back to acoustic fingerstyle playing, with Crosby, Stills and Nash, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell as his new models.

After leaving school in 1973 and working briefly in a soup-canning factory, he took his first paid engagement in 1974 and then joined a short-lived group, Principal Edwards' Magic Theatre. One of its members recommended him to the singer-songwriter Al Stewart, and in early 1975 White joined Stewart's band on keyboards for tours of Britain and the United States. That summer he played keyboards and acoustic guitar on the sessions at Abbey Road for Stewart's Year of the Cat (1976), produced by Alan Parsons. The partnership lasted about twenty years. White moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and co-wrote Stewart's "Time Passages," which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1978 and spent ten weeks at No. 1 on the Easy Listening chart. He later formed a band, Shot in the Dark, that backed Stewart and made one album of its own, and he co-produced Stewart's Famous Last Words (1993). Their duo tours produced the live album Rhymes in Rooms (1992), on which White plays guitar, piano and accordion. His last tour with Stewart was in Britain in 1994.

The other long association of his sideman years was with the singer Basia. His brother Danny White co-founded Matt Bianco, and in 1984 Peter played uncredited acoustic guitar on that group's debut, Whose Side Are You On? When Danny and Basia left to start her solo career, Peter played on her first album, Time and Tide (1987), and on her later studio albums, and he toured with them in 1990 and 1994.

White made his own first record in 1990. Reveillez-Vous (Chase Music Group), the title a French phrase meaning "wake up" chosen in honor of his mother, was made up largely of songs he had written for Stewart and never used, and it found a home on the new smooth jazz radio stations. He gave his first full-length solo concert at the JazzTrax festival on Catalina Island in October 1991. Three albums for the Sin-Drome label followed: Excusez-Moi (1992), Promenade (1993) and Reflections (1994), the last a set of soul and pop standards produced by Paul Brown that reached No. 16 on Billboard's jazz albums chart and features saxophone from Boney James and Richard Elliot.

He signed with Columbia in 1995 and joined the first "Guitars and Saxes" package tour that year with Richard Elliot, Warren Hill and Craig Chaquico. Caravan of Dreams (1996) reached No. 4 on the jazz albums chart and includes "Just Another Day," with Basia singing, and Songs of the Season (1997) began a Christmas strand that has run through his career. Perfect Moment (1998) peaked at No. 3 and contains "Midnight in Manhattan," on which Grover Washington Jr. plays tenor saxophone and which reached No. 1 on Billboard's smooth jazz songs chart. At the first Oasis Smooth Jazz Awards in 2000 the album won CD of the Year, with "Midnight in Manhattan" taking Song of the Year and Best Collaboration and White named Best Guitarist. Glow (2001) and Confidential (2004) both reached No. 2 on the contemporary jazz albums chart. In 1998, 1999 and 2000 he toured on the "Smooth Jazz Christmas" bill with Dave Koz, David Benoit and Brenda Russell, and from 2003 he led his own annual Peter White Christmas Tour, usually with Mindi Abair and Rick Braun.

Playin' Favorites (2006) was a collection of soul and pop favorites, and its "Mister Magic," with Bob James on Fender Rhodes, was a No. 1 smooth jazz single in 2007. He then moved through several labels: ARTizen for Peter White Christmas (2007), Peak Records for Good Day (2009, No. 2 on the jazz albums chart, with "Bright" at No. 1 on the singles chart) and Heads Up for Here We Go (2013), Smile (2014) and Groovin' (2016). On Here We Go the title track features David Sanborn on saxophone and was a No. 1 single in 2012. Smile and Groovin' both reached No. 1 on the contemporary jazz albums chart, and "Head Over Heels" (with Rick Braun) and "Do I Do" were chart-topping singles in 2014 and 2017. Groovin' is his third collection of 1960s and 1970s songs. Through these years he alternated between his own band and package tours, among them "Guitars and Saxes" and "Jazz Attack," on the festival circuit of the contemporary jazz format. With Kirk Whalum he toured on "Guitars and Saxes" in 1996, 1999 and 2010.

Music for STARLUX Airlines (2019) collected pieces he first recorded for the Taiwanese airline's in-flight entertainment, and includes his daughter Charlotte White on violin. After the COVID-19 pandemic he worked mainly as a session player, including on guitarist Norman Brown's Heart to Heart and with the singer Aimie Atkinson. He returned to recording under his own name in 2024, and Light of Day (Lobster Music) was released on February 14, 2025, with guests Rick Braun on "Cityscape," Ilya Serov on "Overdrive," Vincent Ingala on "I Love You Still" and Ernie Watts on "Enchanted." He played a four-night run celebrating the album at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle on January 8 to 11, 2026, and he is also featured on guitarist Steve Oliver's 2026 album Inner Fire. He has lived in the United States since 1978, and in 2026 he was still performing and recording.

White is a smooth jazz artist in the radio and touring sense of the term, and the pop, folk-rock and soul roots of that sound are plain in his career. His professional start was as a keyboardist and acoustic guitarist in a singer-songwriter's rock band, he co-wrote a pop hit, and his own repertoire leans on melody, light Latin and R&B rhythms and arrangements of well-known songs. Reflections, Playin' Favorites and Groovin' are built from soul and pop standards by writers such as Al Green and Bill Withers, the Bee Gees and the Beatles, and Perfect Moment covers "Don't Want To Be A Fool," written by Luther Vandross and Marcus Miller. His own account stresses song and audience over display: he says the point of a concert is to give people a good time, not to show how clever he is.

The jazz-side credentials are real but belong to the contemporary jazz scene rather than to the bebop or post-bop lineage. He is a perennial presence on Billboard's jazz albums and smooth jazz singles charts, has recorded with Grover Washington Jr., Bob James, David Sanborn, Kirk Whalum, Boney James, Dave Koz, Rick Braun, Richard Elliot, Gerald Albright and Brian Culbertson and toured with several of them, and won Best Guitarist at the National Smooth Jazz Awards four years running, from 2000 to 2003. He is mostly self-taught, plays nylon-string, steel-string and electric guitars as well as keyboards and accordion, and is best known for the warm, lyrical sound of the nylon-string instrument. AllMusic's biographer describes his approach to smooth jazz and fusion as lyrical and inventive. By his own account, the Beatles, Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page drew him to the guitar, Mason Williams's "Classical Gas" turned him toward fingerstyle playing, Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue opened his ears to lyrics, and the British group Acoustic Alchemy encouraged him to make records of his own in the late 1980s.