Ben Keith – the veteran steel guitar played who worked with Neil Young for nearly 40 years – has died, reportedly from a heart attack. He was 73.

Young himself appears to have broken the news onstage at a show in Winnipeg on Monday, July 26, dedicating “Old Man”, from the 1972 album Harvest, to his long-standing collaborator: “This is for Ben Keith. His spirit will live on. The Earth has taken him.”

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The filmmaker Jonathan Demme – who directed Young’s concert films Heart Of Gold (2006) and this year’s Neil Young Trunk Show – confirmed Keith’s death in the Los Angeles Times yesterday (July 27).

Demme called Keith “an elegant, beautiful dude, and obviously a genius. He could play every instrument. … Neil has all the confidence in the world, but with Ben on board, there were no limits. Neil has a fair measure of the greatness of his music, but he knew he was even better when Ben was there.”

Keith had already made a name for himself as a major session musician in Nashville, playing on a string of hits including Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces”, before hooking up with Young in February, 1971 for the Harvest sessions.

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Speaking to UNCUT in March 2009, Keith remembered his first meeting with Young. “He wanted a steel guitar player and I lived a couple of blocks from the studio. He’d already started the sessions, and I slipped in as quiet as I could and started playing along, and we cut five songs before I really met him. I didn’t even know who he was. I’d heard of CSNY, but I didn’t know he was doing a solo LP. He seemed like a good guy, as he did music like I do it – spontaneously.”

Young appeared similarly impressed with Keith, as he recalled on an interview in The Tennessean in 2005: “Ben and I developed the style during those sessions. When we did ‘Old Man’ and talked about what he could play, I said, ‘Try to play those single notes and make it sound doubled. Just ride those babies all the way through there, that’s a great sound.”

Keith went on to play on over a dozen Young albums, including On The Beach, Tonight’s The Night, Comes A Time, Prairie Wind, Chrome Dreams II, and became a mainstay of Young’s touring bands, excluding Crazy Horse.

He also worked with Emmylou Harris, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Band, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Linda Ronstadt.

Keith’s passing is another recent loss for Young. In January, his friend, film producer Larry “L.A.” Johnson, also died from a heart attack.