Album: Payton Smith (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • Although he was born in 2000, Payton Smith grew up listening to '90s country music thanks to his mom. He expresses his love for the era on the retro track "92," one of the original tunes that earned him a record deal when he played it CMA Fest in 2018. It's also included on his self-titled debut EP. In the song, Smith takes his girl out line-dancing, which was all the rage back in the early '90s thanks to popular boot-scooters like Brooks & Dunn's "Boot Scootin' Boogie," Tracy Byrd's "Watermelon Crawl" and Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart."
  • Smith wrote this with Nashville songwriting veterans Marla Cannon-Goodman (Lee Ann Womack's "The Fool") and Larry McCoy (Thomas Rhett's "Make Me Wanna").
  • Smith gave his top picks from 1992 in a 2021 Songfacts interview: "'Boot Scootin' Boogie' is up there for me. Just the energy of that song makes me wanna move and groove, especially playing in those old-school honky-tonk dives. If I had to pick a second one, it would probably be 'Straight Tequila Night' by John Anderson. I still believe that song would be a smash today and it is so well written. There's so many songs from the year of '92 that I love."

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