Ex-Allman Dickey Betts Arrested For Domestic Battery

NY (Top40 Charts) - Singer-guitarist Dickey Betts was arrested on Saturday (August 11) and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery after punching his wife Donna Marie Betts in the face while she was driving on U.S. 41, the highway he made famous in the Allman Brothers Band hit "Ramblin' Man." After spending the night in a Sarasota County jail, Betts was released on $2,000 bail the following afternoon (August 12). The incident report from the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office quoted Betts as saying that he "did not know how the victim (Donna Betts) received her injury," according to a report in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Neither Betts's attorney nor his spokesperson were available for comment.

This is not the first time that Betts's anger has gotten him in trouble - earlier this year, he was convicted of domestic battery; he was arrested for attacking his wife at their home last November; and he was charged with putting a gun to Donna Betts's head in 1996, but the charge was dropped after the couple went through rehab. He also was admitted to a crisis center in June 2000 after he was found in an emotional state, destroying some of his personal property at his house.

Interestingly, Betts salutes his wife Donna Marie on his new album, Let's Get Together. He told how she inspired the song "Dona Maria," an instrumental that he likens to the Allmans' "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed".
"If you're a songwriter, you can imagine your wife's always gonna be sayin', 'Well, why don't you write a song about me? You've got all these songs about your daughter, and your song, and, you know, and your girlfriend," he said with a laugh. "So I said, 'Well, you know, 'Donna' is kinda already taken. I mean, I don't know what to do with 'Donna.'' One day, she was coming down the stairs [and] I said, 'Senora Dona Maria.' And I was trying to write a Latin instrumental, but I didn't have the image of what I was trying to do with the music. When I said that, for some reason, something clicked. I said, 'That's my instrumental I'm looking for.'"

Betts added that he and his wife live in a Southwestern mission-style house, and that when he called her "Dona Maria" that day, the imagery of a mysterious Spanish "woman of the house" came to him in a tidal wave.