During his career he worked with Stéphane Grappelli, Lonnie Donegan, Johnny Duncan, Digby Fairweather, Ella Fitzgerald, Ken Snakehips Johnson, Billy Eckstine, Fapy Lafertin, Russ Conway, Biréli Lagrène, Humphrey Lyttelton, Nigel Kennedy, and George Shearing.

His father was Joseph William Wright, a wireless telegraphist for the General Post Office who served with the Royal Engineers in the First World War.

Wright spent the first part of the Second World War playing in jazz clubs in the West End of London, doing session work and performing in bands on radio shows.

He was classified medically unfit to serve due to a childhood injury in a road accident in 1930 that cost him his spleen and half of his liver.

The Denny Wright Trio with violinist Bob Clarke took skiffle and jazz to the Soviet Union in 1957 for the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students.

From 1940 until the early 1980s Wright worked as a session musician, playing guitar for Mary Hopkin, Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones.

With Bill Bramwell, Les Bennetts, and Jimmy Currie, he helped inspire the next generation of British guitarists working with blues in a rock context.

[2] In the 1960s, in addition to session for Mary Hopkin and Jones, he and Keith Cooper produced Tribute to the Hot Club as The Cooper-Wright Quintet.

After Velvet, he formed a band with Don Harper before reforming the Hot Club of London with Johnny Van Derrick (violin), Gerry Higgins (double bass), and his protégé Robert Seaman (guitar).

Wright gave private lessons and at London comprehensive schools, and he lectured at the Royal College of Music on the life of a session musician.