KIX BROOKS RECORDED “SACRED GROUND” FOR HIS OWN SOLO ALBUM IN 1989. THE RECORD DEAL WENT NOWHERE. THREE YEARS LATER, ANOTHER BAND RECORDED HIS SONG — AND TOOK IT TO NO. 2. Before Ronnie Dunn, Kix Brooks had already spent years trying to make Nashville work. He moved there in 1979 and discovered fairly quickly that his songs were getting farther than his voice. John Conlee took Brooks’ “I’m Only in It for the Love” to No. 1 in 1983. Two years later, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band did the same with “Modern Day Romance.” Brooks still wanted his own recording career. An early deal with Avion Records collapsed when the label went bankrupt. Then Capitol Nashville gave him another chance. In 1989, he released the self-titled album Kix Brooks. One of its singles was “Sacred Ground,” written by Brooks with Vernon Rust. It didn’t break him. Brooks later remembered hearing from radio stations that Capitol wasn’t really working the record. He went directly to label executive Jim Foglesong’s successor, Jimmy Bowen? Actually Brooks identifies label head Jim Ed Norman? No—his own recollection names Mr. Crutchfield, and says the executive admitted he simply didn’t understand what Brooks was doing. Brooks’ response was unusual for someone still chasing his first major solo success. He essentially said: then let’s shake hands and part ways. His reasoning was practical. He was a songwriter. He didn’t want good songs climbing only into the lower reaches of the chart and dying because the label wasn’t committed to them. Not long afterward, Tim DuBois heard Brooks’ work and introduced him to Ronnie Dunn. Brooks & Dunn formed in 1990. Their first four singles became No. 1 country hits, and the solo career Brooks had spent years trying to establish was suddenly irrelevant. But “Sacred Ground” wasn’t finished. MCA’s McBride & the Ride recorded it for their second album in 1992, with Tony Brown and Steve Gibson producing. This time radio responded. Their recording climbed to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart, becoming McBride & the Ride’s highest-charting Billboard single. The album Sacred Ground went gold and produced two additional Top 5 singles. The timing created a strange Nashville reversal. While Kix Brooks was becoming one half of the hottest new duo in country music, another band was simultaneously having its biggest hit with a song left behind by the solo career that hadn’t worked. Years later, Brooks could look back at that Capitol album differently. The artist on its cover never became the star he’d intended. But one of its songs did eventually find the audience it had missed the first time.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

KIX BROOKS RECORDED “SACRED GROUND” FOR HIS OWN SOLO ALBUM IN 1989. THE RECORD DEAL WENT NOWHERE. THREE YEARS LATER, ANOTHER BAND CUT HIS SONG — AND TOOK IT TO NO. 2.

Before Brooks & Dunn, Kix Brooks had already spent years trying to make Nashville work.

He moved there in 1979 and learned a hard lesson early: his songs were traveling faster than his voice. John Conlee took Brooks’ “I’m Only in It for the Love” to No. 1 in 1983. Two years later, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band did the same with “Modern Day Romance.”

That should have been encouraging.

It also made the problem sharper.

Kix Brooks was proving he could write hits.

He still wanted to sing them himself.

The Songs Were Winning Before The Artist Was

Brooks kept chasing a recording career.

An early deal with Avion Records collapsed when the label went bankrupt. Then Capitol Nashville gave him another shot. In 1989, he released the self-titled album Kix Brooks.

One of its singles was “Sacred Ground,” written with Vernon Rust.

It had the kind of title and emotional shape that could have helped define him: love treated not as decoration, but as territory that demanded respect. A song like that needed belief behind it. It needed a label willing to push it all the way into the room.

Brooks did not feel that happening.

The single did not break him.

Capitol Did Not Know What To Do With Him

Brooks later remembered hearing from radio stations that Capitol was not really working the record.

That was a dangerous sign. A song can be good, but if the machinery behind it does not move, radio often has little reason to keep leaning in. For a songwriter, that can feel especially painful. You are not only watching your artist career stall. You are watching material you believe in get used up badly.

Brooks went to the label and confronted the situation.

According to his own recollection, the executive admitted he simply did not understand what Brooks was doing.

Brooks’ response was unusually clear for someone still chasing his first major solo success.

Then let’s shake hands and part ways.

He had a practical reason.

He was a songwriter. He did not want good songs climbing only into the lower reaches of the chart and dying because the label was not committed to them.

Then Tim DuBois Changed The Direction

Not long after that, Tim DuBois heard Brooks’ work and introduced him to Ronnie Dunn.

That introduction changed everything.

Brooks & Dunn formed in 1990, and the solo career Brooks had spent years trying to force into shape suddenly became less important. The chemistry with Dunn created something neither man had been able to build alone in quite the same way.

Their first four singles became No. 1 country hits.

That kind of start does not leave much room for second-guessing.

The artist who had walked away from a stalled Capitol deal was now half of the hottest new duo in country music. The dream had not arrived in the form Brooks first imagined, but it had arrived with more power than almost anyone could have predicted.

Still, “Sacred Ground” had not finished its own journey.

Another Band Found The Hit Inside It

In 1992, McBride & the Ride recorded “Sacred Ground” for their second album.

Tony Brown and Steve Gibson produced it, and this time country radio responded.

Their version climbed to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart, becoming the highest-charting Billboard single of McBride & the Ride’s career. The album Sacred Ground went gold and produced two more Top 5 singles.

That created a strange Nashville reversal.

While Kix Brooks was becoming one half of Brooks & Dunn, another band was having its biggest hit with a song left behind by the solo career that had not worked.

The record deal had failed.

The song had not.

It had simply needed another voice, another label, another moment.

The Failed Solo Album Left Something Behind

That is what makes Brooks’ 1989 Capitol chapter more interesting than a simple false start.

The album did not turn him into the star he wanted to become. It did not give him the solo career he had been chasing since arriving in Nashville. But it carried material strong enough to survive the failure of the project around it.

That is often how Nashville works.

A singer can miss.

A label can misunderstand.

An album can disappear.

But a song can wait.

“Sacred Ground” waited just long enough to find McBride & the Ride, and when it did, the song proved that Brooks had not been wrong to protect his material. He had understood the value of what he was writing, even when the business did not yet understand how to sell him.

What “Sacred Ground” Really Leaves Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that McBride & the Ride took Kix Brooks’ song to No. 2.

It is that the song escaped a career that had already been left behind.

A 1979 move to Nashville.

No. 1 hits for John Conlee and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

A bankrupt label.

A Capitol album.

A single the label did not fully understand.

Then Brooks walking away, Tim DuBois introducing him to Ronnie Dunn, Brooks & Dunn exploding onto country radio, and “Sacred Ground” finding its own audience through another band.

Kix Brooks did not become a star through that solo album.

But the album was not empty.

One of its songs kept moving after the record deal stopped moving.

And by the time “Sacred Ground” reached No. 2, Brooks had already learned one of Nashville’s strangest truths: sometimes the career you lose still leaves behind the song that proves you were right.

Video

Country Music

Emmylou Harris Returned to the Ryman After the Balcony Had Become Too Dangerous to Use In 1970, Emmylou Harris was serving drinks at the Hi-Hat Lounge near the Ryman Auditorium. Her daughter was an infant. Harris had not yet found a durable place in the music business, and customers sometimes came into the lounge after attending shows at the Ryman. She later remembered thinking that perhaps she would see a performance inside the building someday. Twenty-one years later, she entered through the stage door with a new acoustic band and recording equipment. The Grand Ole Opry had moved away in 1974. Although preservation work had begun on the Ryman’s exterior, the interior remained badly neglected. The balcony was considered unsafe, and no audience member could sit in it or beneath it. Only about 200 people were placed in a narrow section of the lower floor. From April 30 through May 2, 1991, Harris and the Nash Ramblers played three concerts there. The band included Sam Bush, Roy Huskey Jr., Larry Atamanuik, Al Perkins and a young Jon Randall. Instead of building the performances around Harris’s radio hits, they prepared country, bluegrass and folk material that was largely new to their stage set. The conditions shaped the sound. Acoustic instruments moved through a room built before electronic amplification. The empty balcony and unused pews became part of the recording’s air. The musicians could hear why singers had once regarded the Ryman as an instrument of its own. Released in 1992, At the Ryman won a Grammy. More importantly for the building, the album and accompanying film allowed the public to see the old auditorium as a working music room rather than an obsolete shrine. In March 1993, its owner announced a full interior rehabilitation. The Ryman reopened as a concert hall and museum in June 1994. Harris did not restore the building by herself; preservationists, owners, architects and workers carried that responsibility across many years. What she did was place live music back inside before the renovation was certain. The balcony remained empty for those three nights. The room below it proved the building was not finished.

Country Music

Marty Robbins suffered his first major heart attack in August 1969, at forty-three. Five months later, doctors opened his chest for coronary bypass surgery, a procedure still new enough that survival could not be treated as routine. Between those two events, Robbins recorded “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.” The woman was Marizona Baldwin, whom he had married in 1948. She had known him before “El Paso,” the Grand Ole Opry, television shows and the stock cars he drove at speeds few heart patients would have considered sensible. By 1969, they had been married for more than twenty years and had raised two children. Robbins later connected the song to his hospitalization, saying the experience showed him what a woman endured across a shared life. Over time, the story hardened into the image of him writing the entire lyric from a hospital bed. His biographer found evidence that the song existed earlier and was likely refined during his illness. Robbins himself once told Ralph Emery that he had written it on a bus. The less cinematic truth carries more weight. The heart attack did not necessarily create the song. It changed what Robbins understood himself to be saying. He recorded it on January 2, 1970. On January 27, surgeons operated on his blocked coronary arteries. He recovered quickly enough to receive an Academy of Country Music award three months later and returned to NASCAR competition that October. “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” reached No. 1 and earned Robbins the Grammy for Best Country Song. Its language belonged to an older style of marriage, but its gratitude was specific: a restless man acknowledging the person who had absorbed the consequences of his restlessness. Robbins would live with heart disease for the remainder of his life. He kept touring, recording and racing until shortly before his death in 1982. The song survived as a love letter to Marizona. It did not need to have been born beside a hospital bed. The man who carried it into the studio already knew the words. The failing heart taught him how little time he might have left to mean them.

Country Music

WHEN WILLIE NELSON’S CHILDHOOD CHURCH WAS PUT UP FOR SALE, AN OLD FRIEND CALLED HIM In 2006, only a handful of worshippers remained inside the small Methodist church in Abbott, Texas. The denomination decided to close it. The white wooden building where Willie Nelson and his sister Bobbie had sung as children was placed on the market and could have been moved away for use as a wedding chapel. A longtime Abbott resident named Bernice Pope heard what was happening and contacted Don Reed, one of Willie’s oldest friends. Reed called Willie. Willie’s instruction was brief: make an offer. He purchased the church and entrusted Reed with keeping it open. This was not intended to become a Willie Nelson museum or another performance property. Willie wanted it to remain a church for the town that had raised him. The building contained some of his earliest musical education. Willie and Bobbie had been raised by their grandparents, who brought them to services and encouraged their music. Bobbie played the church piano. Willie sang hymns, learned guitar and absorbed songs long before Nashville knew either sibling’s name. The reopened church was celebrated with a Sunday service in July 2006. Willie stood beside Bobbie’s piano, joined by family, friends and Leon Russell. They sang “Uncloudy Day,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Precious Memories.” After the famous visitors left, the building returned to smaller work. Don and Joyce Reed cared for the property. Services continued. The church helped support scholarships for local students. Management later passed to another caretaker chosen before Reed’s death. Willie also bought Abbott’s old cash grocery around the same time because he did not want the town to lose its store. Neither purchase could reverse every force emptying small American communities. They kept two doors from closing. Years later, Willie and Bobbie returned to the sanctuary and performed “Family Bible” around the piano. By then they had played stages across the world. In Abbott, the room still asked only that Bobbie sit down and Willie stand beside her.

Related Post

You Missed