'I think we realized we had to have a direction as far as just our look, where we were coming from as a duo thematically.' 'If we were focused on doing anything on purpose, it was branding,' says Brooks, sounding like the avid business mind (and onetime chairman of the Country Music Association board, the trade organization tasked with championing the genre worldwide) that he is. They weren't just dynamic entertainers - they also had marketing savvy, and recognized the importance of projecting a stirring image from the start. Press conference announcing their Country Music Hall of Fame induction, Brooks, the more gregarious of the two, feigned shock when Dunn shook his hand as they swapped places at the podium. Rather than burying that origin story, Brooks & Dunn milked it the difference between their personalities has lent their work an interesting tension - Dunn brooding and Brooks bustling in the separate but intersecting orbits they inhabit on stage - and yielded countless inside jokes. The duo's great paradox is that it sprang from manufactured origins - two failing solo artists, then ages 36 (Brooks) and 38 (Dunn), matched up by a record executive in 1991 - and yet endured as a bold-faced presence on the country airwaves for some 17 years, and in the process helped raise the bar for a power-packing sound and persona.

Their music had a hard country edge - a trait that no doubt stands out to ears acclimated to today's molten country-pop blends - but they were just as into rocking hard and swinging hard.īrooks reflects on the phone, 'I was always a little surprised - even to this day I still am - about people going, 'I don't know what this stuff is, because y'all were real country.' We always felt like we were honking it pretty hard out there.'ĪFP/Getty Images Kix Brooks (left) and Ronnie Dunn at the hold the awards they won during the 1996 Academy of Country Music Awards, where the duo won the award for Entertainer of the Year. Already seasoned club performers, Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks pooled influences out of Texas and Oklahoma dance halls, harmony-rich West Coast country-rock, bluesy southern rock and classic Nashville. The duo launched during a boom time for modern honky-tonk approaches (as evidenced by the then-recent breakthroughs of Clint Black and Alan Jackson) and infusions of arena rock energy (on which Kiss-studying Garth Brooks was capitalizing). That it's happening right now to Brooks & Dunn is no small deal. Even in the country music world, with its sweeping reverence for what's come before, it's not often these days that performers are canonized by the establishment and grafted onto the institutional narrative of the tradition at the same moment when they're enjoying a resurgence of youthful interest, influence and popularity in an ever-evolving genre.

The young guns who contributed the album, and saw the project land atop theīillboard country chart.

The Tonight Show, Brooks & Dunn have made appearances with a few of This spring, at venues as wide ranging as the ACM Awards, the Ryman Auditorium and Reboot, an energized, duet-style retrospective pairing the two veterans with new-generation admirers, they were named to the latest class of Country Music Hall of Fame inductees. Meanwhile, the attention being paid to the solid gold and platinum country of the first Bush and Clinton eras - particularly the hearty output of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn - has morphed into more serious forms this year. Getty Images Dierks Bentley (left) and Thomas Rhett perform earlier this year as part of the Hot Country Knights, Bentley's affectionate send-up of '90s country that often includes covers of songs by Brooks & Dunn.īentley has kept the Knights gag going as a warm-up act on his arena tours.

Brooks and dunn swing it