Don Helms

Who was Don Helms?

Don Helms was a steel guitarist best known as the steel guitar player of Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys group.

Helms was a featured musician on over 100 Hank Williams recordings and provided the high, piercing signature steel guitar sound on more than 100 Hank Williams songs and on 10 of his 11 number-one country hits.

Bill Lloyd, the curator of stringed instruments at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said of Helms: “After the great tunes and Hank’s mournful voice, the next thing you think about in those songs is the steel guitar. It is the quintessential honky-tonk steel sound — tuneful, aggressive, full of attitude.” Lloyd also credits Helms' sound as a major influence in shifting the sound of country music away from the hillbilly string-band sound popular in the 1930s and toward the more modern electric style that became prominent in the 1940s.

Helms played a double-neck 1948 Gibson Console Grande steel guitar, which lacked the foot pedals found on a more modern pedal steel guitar, which did not come into prominence in country music until after Hank Williams' death in 1953. He tuned the outside neck to A C# E G# B C# E G#, which he called E6, and the inside neck to F# A B D# F# A C# E, which he called B13. Almost all of Don's classic leads were done on the E6 neck. He used the B13 neck for fills.