Billy Burnette, Dennis Morgan and Shawn Camp talked to The Boot about the song they co-wrote, which became George Strait's 57th No. 1 single.

Billy: Shawn built on the melody by playing along on a ukulele that (songwriter/producer) Cowboy Jack Clement had given him. I had a ukulele, too, so we just started playing around with it. It was a really good groove and the song just started to fall together.

Dennis: Harland Howard used to say, 'Write them with three chords and the truth,' but we beat him on this one -- we only used two chords, and it might not be the truth! Shawn started singing some of the lyrics, and it just came out. I think he had that opening line: 'Hey baby won't you take a little ride' ... I don't think we were thinking about so much as how to craft it, we were just having a ball writing it.

Danny Myrick and Bridgette Tatum talked about the No. 1 hit they wrote for Jason Aldean.

"Originally I was trying to rhyme something with the slang for my state, South Carolina, which is called South Kakalakie, but they ended up taking the line out," Bridgette explains. "The song came to me while I was driving, so I pulled over in the Target parking lot in Nashville and started singing the thing in my phone. Then I took it to Danny."

Jim McBride talked to The Boot about Alan Jackson's first No. 1 single, which was the first of many hits the two co-wrote.

Alan started telling me about how he had this old Dodge van, and he would drive down to Florida for shows and play five or six sets a night. By the time he paid the band and bought gas, he wouldn't make anything. Then he'd go to Arkansas the next weekend and do the same thing. He was whining that he couldn't get a record deal, but other people would get off the bus and come down on Music Row and get a deal.

James Otto talked to The Boot about the touching ballad he wrote with Monty Criswell.

That song was written about a friend of Monty's whose child was diagnosed with cancer. He asked me if it was something that would be too heavy to write about. I related it to my mother-in-law [who had] breast cancer and how it affected me -- I was so afraid when it happened. You put it in reverse and go, 'How hard would it be to see your child go through cancer?' It's horrible. I can't imagine anything worse. So we tried to put ourselves in the position of being a father, what would you be going through. I ended up going to St Jude [Children's Research Hospital] a few years later and got to know some of the kids and doctors and see what they do there. I really found a reason to put the song on my record while I was there. I didn't have any experience with it necessarily until then, so it really took hold there.

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Jim McBride talked to The Boot about the classic hit he co-wrote with Alan Jackson, 'Chattahoochie.'

I knew about the Chattahoochie River because I was raised in Alabama. Sydney Lanier was a poet who had written a poem called 'Song of the Chattahoochie' that was in high school literature books.

I was sitting in my home office in Nashville one day, and I had just read a book about the Chattahoochie. I started playing a little melody, and then I got the first two lines of the song. By that time, Alan was a big star so there was no more writing on 16th Avenue anymore -- we wrote on the road. I'd go out with him on his bus, and we would write out there. I kept a separate notebook, and any time I had a song idea I thought Alan would like, I'd put it in that notebook. I got a map and found out how close the Chattahoochie was to Noonan, Georgia, where Alan was raised. I stopped right there, and I put the song idea in that notebook.

David Bellamy of the Bellamy Brothers talked to The Boot about the duo's recurring hit, 'Let Your Love Flow,' written by Larry Williams. The song was recently declared one of BMI's Top 100 Songs of the Century.

I moved to Los Angeles and started cutting demos with Neil Diamond's band. Neil's drummer, Dennis St. John, told me that one of Neil's roadies, Larry Williams, had written a song that sounded like something we would do. He sent a copy of the song to our producer, Phil Gernhard.

Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles talked to The Boot about the song she and Kristian Bush wrote with the legendary Bill Anderson.

'Joey' is a teen tragedy song. It's important to set the stage in the first few lines -- sort of when the curtain rises, it's what we see in the first scene. So the idea of, 'What if I had said yes? What if I had gone out that night? What if you had turned left, and everything would've turned out alright?' And then we just went from that into, 'Oh my God, this is a car accident, and this is someone who is lamenting the loss of this boyfriend.' When we were about halfway through it, Bill said, 'This is like the teen tragedy songs of the 50s and 60s.' It's like 'Last Kiss,' which even Pearl Jam did a cover of recently. Several of those songs came about around that time.