Country Music Hall of Fame And Museum Opens Brooks & Dunn Exhibit
Brooks & Dunn. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
“I’m a fan. That’s why I got into this. I’m a country music fan,” said Brooks & Dunn’s Kix Brooks on Thursday evening during a special event at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Like many successful country artists, Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn count themselves both fans and students of country music and its history. This October, as the best-selling duo in country music history, Brooks & Dunn will receive one of country music’s highest honors, when they are inducted as the newest members into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
But that’s not the only Hall of Fame accolade that has Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn excited—Thursday evening the duo invited industry members to a preview of their new Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit Brooks & Dunn: Kings of Neon, which opens today and runs through July 19, 2020.
Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn took the stage in the Hall of Fame’s rotunda surrounded by the bronze plaques honoring current members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the same room that will soon house similar likenesses of Brooks & Dunn.
“I cannot believe the plaques on this wall, that these are our peers,” Brooks said. “When Ronnie and I go through our induction ceremony in October, just to be in this room, that’s pretty friggin’ special to me.”
“This induction was of course inevitable,” said Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young, referencing sales successes of more than 6 million copies of their 1991 debut album Brand New Man, 20 No. 1 Billboard singles and 39 Top 10 singles. “They have done so with music that is excellent, invigorating and full of honky-tonk truth.”
“That’s an awful lot of stuff Kyle,” Brooks said. “The truths in there I think we can really identify with, I think brotherhood is one that probably rings very true with what we’ve been through and what we’ve managed to accomplish.”
Pictured (L-R) Ronnie Dunn, Kix Brooks, and Country Music Hall of Fame CEO Kyle Young. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Brooks also recalled how he and Dunn went from struggling solo artists to a duo act, courtesy of a meeting with label executive Tim DuBois.
“For a couple of guys who didn’t know each other from Adam…We’d both been around the block for a long time but we were also pretty broke and when anybody throws any kind of opportunity at you in the music business, you generally take it and try to make the best of it,” he said. “That was our first intention and that same week, we met and wrote our first two No. 1 records. When ‘Brand New Man’ became a No. 1 record, we knew we really screwed up,” he quipped, earned laughter from the crowd. “We have to do something now; we’re in business.”
That pairing has sold more than 30 million albums—more than any other duo in history, regardless of genre. The Brooks & Dunn: Kings of Neon exhibit includes dozens of the duo’s 46 accolades from the Grammys, ACMs, and CMAs, earned between 1992 and 2006.
Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Among the items in the exhibit are early solo albums and photos from both Ronnie and Kix, as well as early drafted lyrics to their hit “Red Dirt Road.” Also included are numerous guitars and stagewear, as well as racing suits emblazoned with the duo’s steer’s head logos, which Brooks & Dunn wore when they drove 5/8th-scale Legends race cars in the 1990s. The exhibit chronicles their careers through to present day, with the release of Reboot earlier this year, a project that found the duo collaborating with fellow country artists including Luke Combs, Midland, Ashley McBryde, and more.
“We just got to go take a peek at what the Hall of Fame has put together for us and it’s really mind-boggling to see that together in one place,” Brooks said. “Those awards he was talking about, those are great and nice, those are big pats on the backs, and those are fun times celebrating with people we owe so much to, almost everybody in this room…you look at those awards and sales, it’s all a byproduct of this amazing experience that we got to have, writing these songs and all the times we spent together with people in this business, all pulling together. That’s what this exhibit is about.”
Dunn was characteristically humble and brief with his remarks, calling the music industry a “big machine of support…It’s hard to stand up here and take a whole lot of credit for all of it.”
Artifacts seen during the opening of Brooks & Dunn: Kings of Neon at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Artifacts seen during the opening of Brooks & Dunn: Kings of Neon at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Artifacts seen during the opening of Brooks & Dunn: Kings of Neon at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
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