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HackLawyer.net: Don Helms, last surviving sideman for Hank Williams, dead at 81

"His steel guitar provided an aching, visceral tone of grief to Williams' music and hence, its very identity.... As a boy, he fell in love with the music of our own Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and in particular, with the steel guitar music of Leon McAuliffe. He got his first steel guitar from his grandmother when he was 15 and at the tender age of 18, began to play with Williams around the joints in Alabama. After Williams' death, Helms joined the Ray Price band and was a key part of that singer's success in the 1950s."