Texas Music News — July 9, 2026
Brian Burns, the Waco troubadour behind “I’ve Been Everywhere (In Texas),” has died after a four-decade career. Two million miles. That’s roughly four round trips to the moon. It’s also what Burns figured he’d logged by the time he hung up his guitar in 2017. Brian Burns grew up in Waco, chasing freight trains and Marty Robbins records long before he ever wrote a song, as detailed on his official artist site. Burns died July 4, according to his wife, Veronica. He closed out a run built on honky-tonks, dance halls, and highway miles.
Burns picked up drums first, not guitar. He joined the Temple-based band Freewheelin’ in 1979, at just 16 years old. The group toured the country playing Texas dance-hall country. Burns hauled his record collection along, turning bandmates onto Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He later fronted the house band at Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic and Farm Aid. By the early ’90s, Burns had gone solo, working troubadour-style with just a guitar and a story to tell.
Brian Burns and the Song That Mapped Texas
Burns released his debut album, Highways, Heartaches, & Honky-Tonks, in 1997. Two years later, Angels & Outlaws produced “Welcome To Texas,” a regional radio hit across Dallas-Fort Worth. Then came 2001’s The Eagle & The Snake: Songs Of The Texians, an album steeped in Texas history and folklore. Its single, “I’ve Been Everywhere (In Texas),” charted nationally. The song later landed in the 2002 film Grand Champion, alongside George Strait and Bruce Willis. Burns named 91 Texas towns in that song, and he’d genuinely driven to every one of them. Johnny Bush, who wrote “Whiskey River,” said a Burns song once “woke my ass up.” He called Burns exactly the kind of storyteller Texas needed.
A vocal tremor doctors could never fully treat wore Burns down. He retired from music in 2017 and settled into graphic design and web work back home in Fort Worth. His wife, Veronica, wrote online that it would have been “30 years of marriage this November.” She shared his own parting words: “Keep the wind at your back and let the road rise up to meet you.” Ninety-one towns, two million miles, one song still playing on Texas radio — that’s the map Brian Burns left behind.
Details at Saving Country Music
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