don helms dies: a virtuoso and a living link

Steel guitar player Don Helms died on August 11.  As this well-written obituary in the Washington Post notes, he played a major role in making the steel guitar a lead instrument in postwar country/western music.  He could make that thing sing.

That's what made him a virtuoso.  What made him a living link was the fact that he played with Hank Williams and His Drifting Cowboys.  He was the last living member of that band. 

Note that we're not talking about the pedal steel, which has dominated country music since the late fifties or so.  That's a beautiful instrument, too, and about as complicated to operate as a 747.  Helms played the pre-pedal steel guitar, closely related to Hawaiian guitar.  Steel guitars were originally placed on the lap and played with a bar in the left hand.  Later versions stood on legs or sat on a tabletop. 

Steel guitars sound more trebly than pedal steels.  The latter is great for creating great cascades of weeping tone. Steel guitars tended to cut through the sound of a record like a hot knife through biscuit dough.  Nobody plays them on Nashville records anymore.

Here's the Don Helms myspace page, where you can hear the master at work.  He had a tough gig, backing old alcoholic/junkie Hank.  They say that Hank once got drunk in a seafood restaurant and shot up an oil painting of a sailing ship firing its cannons.  When the police came he said "it drew on me first."

Ray Price wound up with Hank's old band, including Helms, after he died.  Wound up with his wife, too.   Neither relationship lasted all that long, though I think the band outlasted the marriage by a few years.

Don Helms was 81 when he died.  If you don't think he was a true maestro and a man with deep soul, try playing like him.  Can't be done.  As they used to say: Often imitated, never duplicated.

Comments

[lally]

Nice tribute man. One of a kind.