• 1990-2010, 2015-

  Kix Brooks

  Ronnie Dunn
• Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn were both solo recording artists before becoming a duo. They reluctantly got together in 1990 through the suggestion of Tim DuBois, the founder of the Nashville branch of Los Angeles-based artist management firm Fitzgerald-Hartley, who'd recently been appointed head of Arista Nashville. "A record company guy convinced us that we should be a duo," Brooks recalled to Larry King. "On a Tuesday, over an enchilada, was the day I met him, and we were like, 'We don't wanna do this. We don't know each other. I mean, this is just silly.'"
• The 2003 hit "Red Dirt Road" was a rare co-writing collaboration between the Brooks & Dunn duo. Most of their songs were either penned by just one of the pair or by outside writers.
• Brooks & Dunn took a detour from their music in 2008, when they released a book titled The Adventures of Slim and Howdy. The musicians came up with the characters, which were fictionalized cowboy versions of themselves, and worked with writer Bill Fitzhugh on the manuscript. "We didn't want them to be Dukes of Hazzard silly," Brooks said of the characters to Billboard magazine. "We wanted them to be that kind of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid smile — [not] too heavy, but at the same time [with] a good sense of humor."
• 2009's "Honky Tonk Stomp" from Brooks & Dunn's greatest hits package #1s… and Then Some was the 50th overall single for the pair as well as the final release of their career as a duo.
• Brooks & Dunn signed to Arista Nashville in 1991 and stayed with the label throughout their career. In total the duo recorded ten studio albums, one Christmas album, and three compilation albums.
• The duo's second decade produced three platinum-certified chart-topping albums and twenty Top 20 singles, but those successes almost didn't happen. "We had a record called Tight Rope [in 1999] that hadn't done really well, and we were just getting kind of threadbare," Brooks told Country Weekly. "We weren't really writing together anymore, and we were just kind of done."
  
  It was former Sony Music Chairman Joe Galante who persuaded the pair to give their partnership one more shot. "Joe sat down with us and just convinced us we still had some music to make," Brooks continued. "He said, 'If I'm wrong, then you can shut it down. But I don't think I am.' We had so much respect for him and his legend. Neither one of us knew him, but we said, 'OK. This guy is for real, and he's a big-time guy.'"
• Brooks and Dunn announced in 2009 that they were splitting, before launching their Last Rodeo Tour. Their final show was at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena on September 2, 2010. The pair reunited in 2015 for a series of concerts with Reba McEntire in Las Vegas.

Comments: 2

• Barbara Bell from Blueridge GaI luv all their songs but I have two l favorite Red dirt Road and Believe.
• Ann Hansen from RenoI have so many favorites but my favorite is Indian Summer.

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