Nashville singer-guitarist Molly Tuttle returns to her Berklee stomping grounds

When you’re a kid and your dad is a guitar teacher, and there are guitars scattered around at home, and you have it in your mind that you’d like to play music someday, there’s a chance that you’re going to do more than just glance at those guitars.

Singer-songwriter and fleet-fingered guitarist Molly Tuttle, who will celebrate the release of her album “When You’re Ready” at Café 939 in Boston on July 17, did a lot more than glance while growing up in California.

“By the time I was 8, I had already tried violin and piano, but didn’t really get motivated to practice either one,” said Tuttle, 26, who studied music at Berklee in Boston, but now lives in Nashville. “I always thought the guitar was a nice instrument, so I asked my parents for one, and my father got me a little Baby Taylor guitar and started showing me stuff. He was my first main teacher.”

By the time she was 11 and up through her high school years, her dad, Jack Tuttle, had Molly playing guitar in his bluegrass band, along with her two brothers. Most of the shows were in California, but they would occasionally leave town to play at bluegrass festivals around the country.

“It was a little strange at times,” said Tuttle, “because nobody at my high school was really part of that world, so it almost felt like I had two different lives. I had my school friends, and then I would go play a show on weekends.”

But there was plenty of music in both of those lives, and there was more than just bluegrass.

“When I was in middle school, I was playing electric guitar, and I was in a band with some friends,” said Tuttle. “We’d cover Red Hot Chili Peppers or Sublime or Operation Ivy. So, I always listened to a bunch of different styles of music.”

Tuttle focuses much more on the acoustic side of things these days, with her original songs on “When You’re Ready” ranging from the dreamy “Sleepwalking” to the more rocking “Light Came In (Power Went Out).” She sings in a sometimes full-bodied, sometimes plaintive voice, and her guitar-playing can go anywhere from masterful flatpicking that reveals a Doc Watson influence to something approaching an attack on the strings that’s reminiscent of clawhammer banjo playing.

Even though Tuttle makes playing the guitar seem effortless, she candidly admits, “It’s not easy. It’s never been easy, and it still isn’t. But I think after a few years of playing I was obsessed with it, and writing songs and singing are what have really what kept me interested in guitars because I could accompany myself. I’ve always gone through phases of being into learning tunes, and practicing guitar, and getting into singing or songwriting.

“Singing has been part of my life since I was a kid,” she added. “That gradually became a bigger focus for me and I started taking voice lessons when I was a teenager. And my dad always encouraged me to sing. Even when I first started out, and I was a really quiet singer, and hadn’t found my own vocal style yet, he was always really supportive of me singing. But the guitar has always seemed like a fun challenge to me, and there’s endless amounts to learn on the instrument.”

Tuttle will be showing off what she’s learned at her Café 939 show, where, switching between a Preston Thompson guitar and one from the Pre-War Guitar Company, she’ll front her 5-piece band of fellow Nashville musicians

“It’s a new band for me,” she said, “a lineup that more reflects the sound of the new album. So, we’ll be doing a lot of stuff off that as well as some new covers. We recently worked up a cover of ‘Zero’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We most likely won’t be doing any unrecorded originals, but people there will certainly hear a lot of stuff they haven’t heard live before.”