To put it plainly, someone screwed up. The CMA Awards aren’t here to honor the genre’s past legends with current awards. They’re here to further the agendas of Music Row’s major labels, and to give whatever manufactured hot commodity a producer has come up with a price they probably don’t deserve.

But despite all odds, Brooks & Dunn is the CMA Vocal Duo of the Year for 2024. And while this is partly due to an incredibly weak field – and likely a concerted push from a label due to the recent Restart II release – it’s also good to see that older country acts can still bring out the unlikely and deserved.

The numbers behind this win are quite astonishing. This is the first time in 17 years that the duo has won the CMA Duo of the Year, and it is also 32 years removed from when they first won the award.

Brooks & Dunn are no strangers to winning CMA Duo of the Year. They won the award every year between 1992 and 2006, except for 2000 when Montgomery Gentry took it home. That’s fourteen Duo of the Year awards alone. This year there are 15. The win, along with others over the years, made them the most awarded artist in CMA history, only to be tied by Chris Stapleton later in the evening.

But unlike country group Old Dominion who won their ridiculous 7th CMA Group of the Year trophy on Wednesday night (11/20), those 15 Duo of the Year awards were deserved for Brooks & Dunn. Make no mistake, in their day the duo was criticized for being a little too pop and a little too pretty, much like some of their contemporaries in the larger “Class of ’89” like Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt.

But time has revealed that Brooks & Dunn’s music is eternally relevant and strongly country. Their performance of the 2006 classic “Believe” at the 2024 CMA Awards literally brought the audience to tears. Ronnie Dunn may be 71, but he’s still one of the most powerful and emotional singers in all of country music, partly because he comes from an era where you had to be a good singer to make it.

“It’s shocking,” Ronnie Dunn said backstage afterwards. “I don’t even know how to put it into words honestly.”

“Unexpected,” Added Kix Brooks. “Most people will say that. If we said that twenty years ago, you might say BS. But should we expect this in ’24? Probably not.”

The win is reminiscent of George Strait’s Entertainer of the Year win in 2013, in the middle of Strait’s farewell tour. It was also out-of-the-blue, but deserved. It was also seen as a farewell gift. But for Brooks & Dunn, this could be the start of a third run.

There were few bright spots at the 2024 CMA Awards (read the SCM LIVE Blog for full details). But the idea that a 35-year-old duo could win Duo of the Year gives hope that other legends could win in the future, especially as both the Duo and Group categories remain such open fields.