Songfacts®:

• This song, which Toby Keith penned with frequent collaborator Bobby Pinson, finds the singer talking of a bygone, more courteous era, where the streets were safe and householders didn't need to lock their doors.
  
  Keith told Billboard magazine that the idea for the track came from a phone call with Pinson. "He was coming back from Alabama or something, back to Nashville," he recalled. "He was on a little ol' two-lane highway. He called me up and said, 'I got an idea for a song... Every 20 miles I've got to slow down and go through one of those 35 miles per hour towns.' We started talking about it, and by the time I saw him he had a little piece of it put together, and I said, 'I want to talk about growing up in that little town and about how life has changed,' and we went from there."