Leon McAuliffe
American musician
William Leon McAuliffe (January 3, 1917 – August 20, 1988) was an American Western swing guitarist who was a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys during the 1930s. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of that band, and was a member of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.
Biography
When he was sixteen he was a member of the Light Crust Doughboys, playing both rhythm guitar and steel guitar. In 1935, at age 18, he played with Bob Wills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He stayed with Wills until World War II.
With Wills, he helped compose "San Antonio Rose". He is more noted, however, for his most famous composition, "Steel Guitar Rag", and his playing, along with that of Robert Lee Dunn (of Milton Brown's Musical Brownies), that popularized the steel guitar in the United States.
His playing (and Dunn's) is also credited with inspiring the rhythm and blues electric guitar style occurring some 20 years later.
After the war, McAuliffe returned to Tulsa and formed a Western swing band named the Cimarron Boys. In 1949, their song "Panhandle Rag" (Columbia) reached No. 6 on the Billboard country chart.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6524781. VIAF identifies the subject as 19866200. The Library of Congress control number is n91105738. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1988, 1935 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leon McAuliffe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.