Brooks & Dunn

If you’ve ever had the good fortune to go line dancing, there’s an excellent chance you did it to Brooks & Dunn’s hit 1992 single “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”. In the early ‘90s, as the neo-traditionalist movement fell out of fashion and country music drew more and more influence from the big, brash guitars of stadium rock, Brooks & Dunn held steady with the genre’s roots. Introduced by an Arista Records executive who thought they’d write well together, Kix Brooks (born in Louisiana in 1955) and Ronnie Dunn (born in Texas in 1953) were a match made in honky-tonk heaven; Brooks’ high-energy swagger proved the perfect complement to Dunn’s soulful delivery. Their 1991 debut, Brand New Man—featuring plenty of twang and fiddle, with just a hint of rock and pop—became the soundtrack for roadhouse dance floors around the U.S. and started them on the path to becoming the best-selling musical duo in country-music history. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: by sticking to their tried-and-true sound, nine of the 12 studio albums they released between 1991 and 2007 went platinum stateside. Following retirement, solo efforts and a Vegas reunion, Brooks & Dunn passed the torch with 2019’s Reboot, an album that found them reworking a dozen of their hits with traditionally minded newcomers like Ashley McBryde, Jon Pardi and Luke Combs.