In April of 2006, Kenny Chesney released "Summertime" as the third single from his The Road and the Radio album. The song, written by Craig Wiseman and Steve McEwan, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Below, Wiseman tells The Boot about how the song came to be.

Steve and I have had a good run of getting songs cut by Kenny: He and I wrote "Young," and we have another Kenny cut called "Time Flies" on [2012's Welcome to the Fishbowl].

[When we wrote "Summertime"], Steve was in town from London. We had about three days to write, so we were really taking advantage of our time. We'd go til 1 or 2 in the morning ... until we dropped! We were writing "My Old Friend" [for Tim McGraw], but we were trying not to write a ballad, so we kept trying not to write that particular song. Finally, around midnight, we took a break from writing "My Old Friend" and went out on the back steps of my office; it was that first night when it stays warm, and you can smell the grass growing. I walked outside and was like, "Man ... summertime! Smell that!" It was that first warm night of summer; it was great.

That next day, I was driving in to write with Steve. For whatever reason, I kept going, "Summertime! Summertime!" It was sticking in my head. We got to the office, and I pulled up a drumbeat and started saying it to the beat.

I didn't want to call it "Summertime," because you want to come up with a little better of a title than that, but it just kept coming back to "Summertime."

I'm from Mississippi, so I'm a kid from the South. Summertime was always the start of the year for me, and it still is. I look at my year starting not in January, but in June, when school is letting out. If I'm going to be associated with a season, I'd rather it be summertime than try to write another Christmas song or something!

This story was originally written by Alanna Conaway, and revised by Angela Stefano.

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