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 and was nicknamed “The World's Greatest Western Swing Steel Guitarist”.. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of that band.
Born William Leon McAuliffe in Houston in 1917, he started playing both acoustic and steel guitar at 14, and quickly joined the Waikiki Strummers, a Hawaiian-style group, on the latter instrument in 1931. In 1933, he joined the early Western swing band the Light Crust Doughboys, and found a major influence in Milton Brown's steel guitarist Bob Dunn, who taught him how to electrically amplify his instrument. In 1935, he moved on to the Texas Playboys, who would soon become the premier Western swing band in existence.
After the war, McAuliffe returned to Tulsa and decided to form his own big band, which he dubbed the Cimarron Boys. The group played regularly on a Tulsa radio station and soon signed a contract with Columbia, and McAuliffe's instrumental showcase "Panhandle Rag" became a Top Ten hit in 1949. This group recorded more than 200 songs and was generally recognized as innovative and technically proficient. Over the course of the '50s, McAuliffe's band mixed down-home Western tunes with smooth big band jazz, which sometimes brought him fairly close to mainstream swing territory.
Though McAuliffe is most famous for his association with the Texas Playboys, he also had a respectable solo career. Around mid-1953, he was doing a daily show over the 50,000 watt KVOO in Tulsa, OK from 12:15pm. Leon also appeared on Wednesday nights at 11:00pm as well as Saturday nights at 10:30pm on a show called the Western Dance Parade. Leon and his band also played every Wednesday and Saturday evenings at the Cimarron Ball Room in Tulsa. In 1954 he purchased radio station KAMO in Rogers, Arkansas. In the late 1950s, he appeared on ABC-TV's Jubilee USA and other broadcasts. McAuliffe funded a music program at Rogers State College in Claremore, Oklahoma, paying for a recording studio and office on campus.
They did so successfully until the death of pianist Al Stricklin in 1986, at which time they disbanded. McAuliffe moved on to Rogers State College in Claremore, Oklahoma, and taught a course on the music industry which dealt primarily with business and legal issues. The Steel Guitar Hall of Fame honored McAuliffe in 1978, and he was inducted into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1991. He died in a local Tulsa hospital after a long illness on September 20, 1988. He was 71 years old.
(Edited from AllMusic. IMDb & The Handbook of Texas)