Jennings and Keller give downtown Monterey great Americana.

Aduo from southern Florida named Jennings and Keller swoop through downtown Thursday, Aug. 18 for another sojourn into what now marks one of the hottest popular music genre explosions in decades.

Half country and half bluegrass, the hybrid category Americana has been dominating Billboard charts for over a year now. The idiom is bespoke with mountain fiddling, acoustic and slide guitars, banjos and dobros, with parallel vocal harmonies and lyrical storytelling.

“Everything that’s not pop country falls into Americana,” says Laurie Jennings, who sings lead vocals and pens many of the group’s originals. “Even [country star] Emmylou Harris is called Americana now. But we still have to throw a label out there.

“It’s an interesting and ongoing discussion about how and why music gets so labeled,” Jennings adds, evoking jazz legend Duke Ellington’s quote: “There’s only two kinds of music – good and bad!”

The other half of this band is Dana Keller, a side-session journeyman who is virtuosic on the dobro and pedal steel guitar who has spent decades in some of the finest recording studios in the country. He counts his influences as fellow dobroist Jerry Douglas, the great pedal steel player Buddy Emmons and American roots singer Gene Clark.

The two musicians met in 2005, as members of a six-piece country band playing covers. “We had a lot of our own music that we wanted to record instead of doing old classic songs,” Jennings says.

They launched as an acoustic duo, and have been touring for nearly a decade.

“We call our thing fusion-folk Americana,” Jennings says. “We’ve been told that our sound is very eclectic, that we pull from diverse musical aspects, so we just use those three words.”

JENNINGS AND KELLER 7-9pm Thursday, Aug. 18. $10. Bay of Pines Organic Restaurant, 150 Del Monte Ave., upstairs, Monterey. 920-3560, www.bayofpines.com