Don Helms Interview

In 1943, at the age of seveneteen, steel guitarist Don Helms joined the band of an up-and-coming Hank Williams, performing dates across south Alabama as a member of Williams’s Drifting Cowboys. Helms’s first stint in that group was interrupted by the draft, but Helms would rejoin Hank in Nashville in 1949, establishing himself as a key ingredient in the Drifting Cowboys’ definitive line-up and contributing his signature steel to the bulk of Williams’s recorded output. Helms would go on to work extensively with numerous country acts, including Ray Price, Patsy Cline, the Wilburn Brothers, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams, Jr. In his later years, he toured with Hank’s daughter, Jett Williams. In 2005, with co-author Dale Vinicur, he published a memoir, Settin’ the Woods on Fire: Confessions of Hank’s Steel Guitar Player.  

This interview was conducted over the phone by Darwin Lee Hill, host of Darwin Lee’s Real Hillbilly Music Show, which broadcast from 1995 to 2015 on WHVW, 950 AM, in Poughkeepsie, New York. The Southern Music Research Center is currently working in collaboration with Hill to digitize and make accessible, through this archive, dozens of additional interviews with classic country music pioneers. To commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Hank Williams (September 17, 1923), we are making available now Hill’s interviews with several of Williams’s original band members. The complete Darwin Lee Hill Collection will ultimately include over one hundred interviews, as well as full episodes of Hill’s weekly radio show and additional materials from Hill’s personal collection of rare recordings and ephemera.