Billy Don Burns might not be a singer that modern mainstream country music fans know well, but if you check his name you will see the word “legend” attached to it plenty.
And one site even called him a “true outlaw of American country music.”
But it appears he took the “outlaw” part frighteningly close to not being here anymore during a recent drug and alcohol binge. A lengthy post to his Facebook page showed him looking frail, hooked up to wires in a hospital bed, and laid out the situation in his own words.
Burns explained that he flew to Los Angeles in November to spend time with Johnny Rotten.
“I knew he doesn’t like me bringing any cocaine or anything around and all that so I found me (some) cocaine and whiskey and I got messed up man,” Burns said. “It really takes me way out there now and I ran over a big concrete thing and tore up my car.”
With his car disabled, Burns said he walked to the liquor store, and he decided to start “shooting the drugs.”
“I was shooting Jim Beam Whiskey and cocaine,” he said. “I’m out of my head man. I decided ‘why don’t you just kill yourself Billy?’ So, I stabbed myself.”
Burns estimated he stabbed himself about “4 or 5” times and bled “over a pint on one of the cuts.”
“They rushed me to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, CA,” he said. “They put me on the 4th floor which is a lockdown floor in the telemetry unit, that is a heart unit.”
He closed by asking everyone to pray for him.
Good news for fans of Burns is in that follow up posts he indicated that he is now “doing well,” and entering treatment.
“This time is different,” he said. “I have always had to go to treatment because it was ordered from someone else. This time I am going for myself. This will be my new chapter.”
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Read the original article on pennlive.com.
