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.' 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. This spring, at venues as wide ranging as the ACM Awards, the Ryman Auditorium and The Tonight Show, Brooks & Dunn have made appearances with a few of the young guns who contributed the album, and saw the project land atop the Billboard country chart. While ramping up to release 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. During a spring 2015 performance in front a Nashville industry crowd, one of the special guests was 'Ronnie Buns,' played by Lady Antebellum singer Charles Kelley, who gamely preened through 'My Maria,' a Grammy-winning Brooks & Dunn redo of an early '70s tune, in a shaggy wig, aviator sunglasses and a lightning bolt print western shirt.īentley has kept the Knights gag going as a warm-up act on his arena tours. Their set lists have included versions of songs by Alan Jackson, Tracy Byrd, Shania Twain and an array of other past hit-makers, but inevitably there's a Brooks & Dunn cover. A few years back, the canny, established hit-maker Dierks Bentley and his touring band cooked up a nutty but clearly affectionate, costumed caricature of '90s country singers and songs and dubbed themselves the Hot Country Knights. Up until pretty recently, nostalgia for country music from the particular moment of the early-to-mid 1990s was as likely as not to be expressed with a playfully knowing wink.

Brooks and dunn swing it