Willie Nelson’s Sad Suicide Confession Sparks Concern From Pals Who Fear ‘He Could Be Driving Himself To The Edge’
Country icon Willie Nelson’s bombshell confession that he once attempted suicide has left shaken friends and family fearing he could be driving himself to the edge again with his grueling workload, RadarOnline.com has learned.
In his new memoir, Me and Paul: Untold Stories of a Fabled Friendship, the 89-year-old On the Road Again singer reveals he was once at the end of his rope while trying to break in as a songwriter in Nashville.
Depressed and knocking back bourbon at a bar, he recalled a tune by Lightnin’ Hopkins about “feeling so bad until he lay his head on some lonesome railroad line and let it ease his troubled mind.”
Willie writes how he once thought, “So why not?”
The blue singer walked outside into the snowy street of Broadway, Nashville’s main thoroughfare, and lay down in the middle thinking: “Why not let some souped-up Plymouth Barracuda ease my troubled mind? But there was hardly any traffic. If one or two drivers saw me, they swerved out of the way.”
After 15 minutes, the country music legend says he ultimately decided to go back inside the bar to drink more.
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Shortly after that dark time, the showbiz doors started opening for Willie. Patsy Cline recorded his tune Crazy in 1961.
But his confessions about his times with late drummer pal Paul English have been “a huge shock for his loved ones,” an insider spilled to RadarOnline.com.
“Maybe that’s why he continues to work so hard, afraid that it’ll all disappear," the insider said.
“People around him would like to see him slow down but the way Willie sees it, he’s going to die anyway so it might as well be onstage, doing what he loves.”
Willie, who is now 89 years old and still stands as a monumental force in the country music hemisphere, has since recorded and released more than 2,500 of his own original songs.
The Family Bible crooner has also recorded more than 250 albums of original and covered material, and has starred in at least 25 films both as himself and as actual characters in the movies.
The outlaw country musician is also back touring after a long hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, set to play dozens of shows this year alone.