In the rural east Texas graveyard where my father and his parents are buried, just a stone's throw from a black church built on land donated by my father's father, I embrace my country-and-western roots. On yearly visits to the ancestral homestead, I drive long flat highways between Longview, Marshall, and Shreveport, where I temporarily shed my native Yankee persona to blend into a very different world. It's not easy.
photo: Pamela Springsteen
Brand new men
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Brooks & Dunn
Red Dirt Road
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Misleading stereotypes about the South and Southwest are so deeply ingrained in the received wisdom of outsiders that average native New Yorkers know as little about the region's contemporary sociology as they know about the quotidian reality of most Islamic nations. In truth, the lucky landed families usually farm their land or lease it; families who've lost or sold their land also lose cohesion and identity as they're forced into itinerant labor markets both legal and illegal. They might truck timber, take seasonal work on gas pipelines, become roving ranch hands or carnival roustabouts, or move to larger cities for factory work. But the nostalgia for landed security always remains, enshrined in lyrics of country songs.
As Leadbelly could have told you, this area used to be plantation country, and despite the presence of two historically black colleges, the economic gap between local whites and blacks remains. But Southern blacks and whites still share a sensibility. I learned about east Texas via channel flipping between dinosaur rock, southern hip-hop, and country, but it's the local country station that commands my attention, by mirroring the reality around me: shiny pickup trucks with rooftop gun racks, people sporting Western boots as much to ward off invading fire ants as for style. Here were avid odes to church socials, massive bales of summer hay, ratty pawn shops, and rustic honky-tonks. And in looking for the authentic source of these Teflon cowboy anthems, I discovered the music of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn.
From their first album as a duo in 1991 the pair wore a natural eclecticism on their sleeves. Dunn's vocal tendency to slide from hillbilly yodel to blues moan and back paired well with Brooks's obvious affection for Memphis soul melodicism and Crescent City swing. All the songs they wrote, from the paniolo-styled ballad "Neon Moon" to the Pentecostal love song "Brand New Man," revealed two good ol' boys who seemed to accept and actually revel in America's thoroughly mongrelized heritage. But their best album tracks didn't always get to be singles.
In the 1990s, the club-driven line-dancing craze helped lock the sound and thematic emphasis of country radio on manic beer-fueled boogie and nostalgic love songs, with a virtual ban on anything with a whiff of pathological brooding or "un-Christian attitude." This was the musical climate into which Brooks & Dunn debuted their synergistic mix, thereby becoming the top-selling country duo of the decade. They could sing about divorce, or cheating, or outlaw behavior, but only with shame or regret and a desire for redemption. This resulted in a string of singles not bland so much as relentlessly good-humored. Bad girls and wild boys got lots of play in B&D's songs, but always with a subtly fundamentalist spin on their probable comeuppance. Brutally frank Steve Earle couplets like "they draft the white trash first/'round here anyway" would never make it onto a B&D album.
That's largely why Red Dirt Road, B&D's eighth studio album on Arista, is such a provocative surprise. These crown princes of country radio, who've played Republican conventions and aggressively recast Lollapalooza freakiness into a travelling rodeo circus featuring multiple headliners and seven hours of wholesome family fun, have made a record aimed at the midsize venues and more demanding audiences they gave up when they became radio darlings and began headlining huge arena shows. Ronnie told Billboard: "This is the most honest record we've made since Brand New Man. . . . And I think the undercurrent that triggered this reflection is what's going on in the world. It's the first time we perceived us as Americans, as being threatened." Galvanized by 9-11, these fortysomething singer-songwriters soberly reassessed how they grew up, then recorded 15 sociological portraits of unvarnished Americana.
Kix Brooks was born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, while his partner, Ronnie, is a failed divinity student from Coleman, Texas, who earned his musical spurs playing the boogie bars of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Both claim diverse influences, from the Eagles to Earl Scruggs, from Cajun dance tunes to Leon Russell's hippie gospel rock. When first introduced to Ronnie by an Arista executive in Nashville, Kix had already placed a few charting singles with other acts and released a solo LP, while Ronnie had just finished the demos on some songs that would end up on the duo's 1991 debut, Brand New Man. Chances are they would never have thought about teaming up had Arista not offered them a recording contract. So the question is: Were Brooks & Dunn fabricated by Arista Nashville's a&r department? Did Tim DuBois envision Kix and Ronnie as the Mick and Keith of country music, and manipulate fate to make these two hungry songwriters conform to this vision? Given the collaborative standards of Nashville's Tin Pan Alley, the point is moot. Kix was obviously born to reinvent the progressive country ballad, while Ronnie is synergistically called to sing redemptive parables rather than bitter rants.
