Mickey Gee was one of those stalwart musicians whose playing was familiar to millions but whose name was known to very few.

Dubbed “the master of the Telecaster” after his favourite instrument and “the best guitarist ever to come out of Wales”, his skilled playing can be heard backing such Welsh stars as Tom Jones, Shakin’ Stevens and Dave Edmunds.

Born in Cardiff in 1943, he began playing the guitar in his early teens. In 1963 he joined a local band called Tommy Scott and the Senators. The group swiftly became the Playboys and then the Squires, with Gee acting as musical director.

After recording several tracks with the producer Joe Meek as Tommy Scott and the Squires, the group broke up at the end of 1964 when the impresario Gordon Mills offered the lead singer a solo contract. Tommy Scott changed his name to Tom Jones and went on to stardom, while Gee returned to playing pubs and clubs on the South Wales live-music circuit.

There were also regular forays into the London music scene, and in 1968 he briefly joined Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, although he had already left by the time the singer hit the charts in 1969 with A Little Help From My Friends. In 1970 Gee teamed up with his close friend and fellow Welsh guitarist, Dave Edmunds, in Love Sculpture. By then the band had enjoyed its lone hit with Sabre Dance, and Love Sculpture soon folded.

When Edmunds got a recording deal as a solo artist, Gee was recruited to play on his first release, a stirring cover of Smiley Lewis’s old hit I Hear You Knocking, which topped charts around the world in 1970-71, and eventually sold three million copies. Gee’s memorable lead guitar intro actually starts at the wrong time but Edmunds so liked the effect that he insisted on keeping the “mistake” in, and it remains an enduring part of the record’s charm.

It was a rare, if not unique, error for Gee’s finger-picking style, modelled on such masterful American stylists as Chet Atkins and James Burton, which bore the hallmark of a true virtuoso. Friends and admirers have long enjoyed telling the story of his encounter backstage with Atkins many years ago. The guitar was being passed around and, as a tribute, Gee played an Atkins piece that he had copied from a recording. Atkins, a legendary figure credited with having created the sound of modern Nashville guitar playing, was astonished: the record featured two guitars and Gee had somehow found a way of playing both parts simultaneously.

I Hear You Knocking was recorded at the newly-opened Rockfield Studio near Monmouth, and Gee became a regular on sessions at the studio, including further recordings with Edmunds, with whom he also toured in the first incarnation of the group Rockpile.

Among those he backed on sessions there in the early 1970s was a South Wales singer called Michael Barratt, who recorded under the name Shakin’ Stevens. His early records failed to sell but when he finally made the breakthrough in 1980, Gee was back, adding his peerless guitar licks to such hits as Green Door and This Ole’ House. He continued to record and tour with Stevens into the 1990s, while also playing in the ad-hoc pick-up band Willie and the Poor Boys, whose alumni included Charlie Watts and Jimmy Page.

A quiet and private man who preferred anonymity to the limelight, in recent years he spent his time playing his old haunts on the South Wales pub circuit, such as the Royal Oak on Cardiff’s Broadway.

He died after a long battle with emphysema.

Mickey Gee, guitarist, was born on December 31, 1943. He died on January 21, 2009, aged 65