Six songs that still define summer: “Summer of ’69,” “Good Vibrations,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and “All Summer Long.” Five were Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 when they came out, two of them at No. 1. The sixth, “Here Comes the Sun,” was never a US single and still reached No. 3 on a Billboard chart 50 years later.
Updated October 29, 2026.
Picture the sun shining through a bright blue sky, a warm breeze on your sunburned cheeks and the smell of salt in the air. Most of us know how sand sticks to your toes long after you leave the beach. Songs like these bring all of that back. Turn on your radio, phone or old record player, because six classic summer songs are calling.
These six outlast anything new that tries to replace them. A good summer song doesn’t need production tricks. It needs a hook simple enough to shout out a car window, and all six of these have one.
“Summer of ’69” by Bryan Adams (1985)
Bryan Adams wrote “Summer of ’69” for his 1984 album Reckless, and A&M Records released it as the album’s fourth single on May 27, 1985. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. By June 2016 it had sold 1,606,647 units in the US, per Nielsen SoundScan. The story is a teenager at the peak of his powers who forms a band with his school friends. Dreams are big and the world feels like a playground. Then, on a hot summer night at the drive-in, he meets a girl. Most of us can remember the first summer when we felt like we could do anything. Adams has called the “69” a metaphor for coming of age rather than a real date, and later admitted the number doubles as a pun.
A girl intervenes, restless and starry-eyed. Promises are exchanged, memories made. It’s an electric shock of life that stays with you long after that summer is gone. The song looks back on that summer as the best days of his life. Plenty of people feel that way about a certain summer.
“Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys (1966)
What band is more associated with the beach than the Beach Boys? The Southern California group of Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine released “Good Vibrations” on October 10, 1966. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 10 and held the top spot for two weeks. It also picked up four nominations at the 9th Annual Grammy Awards. That wavering, spooky sound is an Electro-Theremin, played on the session by its inventor, Paul Tanner. Not enough is said about how mixed and original their sound was, or how good they were as musicians. The songs are so catchy that people forget the skill behind them. A song called “Good Vibrations” is a fitting match for summer, a season that is all about energy.
The single took months to finish. Estimates of what it cost run from $10,000 to $50,000, and some reports went as high as $75,000. Brian Wilson put the figure closer to $25,000 in a 2018 interview. Either way, it was the most expensive single anyone had recorded at the time. The premise of the song is simple: boy meets girl, and she gives off good vibrations, with a refrain that keeps building.
“Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters (1964)
The Drifters released “Under the Boardwalk” in June 1964, and it reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 1964. It almost didn’t get made the way it did. Lead singer Rudy Lewis died the night before the recording session, so the group’s other lead vocalist, Johnny Moore, sang it instead.
The song is a day spent hiding from the sun under a seaside boardwalk, with a carousel going in the park and the smell of hot dogs and fries drifting down from above. Who hasn’t taken that walk? Hot concrete on one side, the waves on the other. Easy snacks, ocean air and a good friend beside you make a perfect way to relax. That picture has outlived nearly every other beach song from its era.
“Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles (1969)
Most of us can rattle off John, Paul, George and Ringo as easily as our morning routine. Let’s give George his due. George Harrison wrote and sang “Here Comes the Sun” for the Beatles‘ 1969 album Abbey Road, where it opens side two. It wasn’t released as a single in the UK or US at the time. “Something” got that job. So its popularity built through the album and radio over decades. In 2019, when it promoted the album’s 50th anniversary reissue, it reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart, the Beatles’ first top-ten hit there.
Harrison wrote it in early 1969 after skipping a business meeting at Apple and walking around Eric Clapton’s garden with one of Clapton’s acoustic guitars. The long, cold winter giving way to the sun reads as much like relief from the band’s business fights as it does an actual season. The “little darling” could be anyone who pulls you out of a bad stretch. Anyone who has lived through a long, gray winter knows how good the first warm day feels.
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding (1968)
Otis Redding recorded “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” shortly before December 10, 1967, when his plane crashed into Lake Monona near Madison, Wisconsin, killing him and four members of his backing band, the Bar-Kays. Stax released the single on its Volt label in January 1968. It became the first posthumous No. 1 single in the US and topped the pop chart for four weeks. It won two Grammy Awards, Best R&B Song and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.
After Redding’s death, guitarist and co-writer Steve Cropper mixed the track at Stax and added the seagulls and crashing waves, as Redding had asked. The song is a man who has left Georgia for San Francisco with little but himself. He’s lonely and broke, and the future looks blank. So he sits on the dock, wasting time, waiting for a better tide. The melody sounds peaceful while the words sound lost, and that’s why it sticks. It’s calm and restless, sweet and sad, all at once. Most people have had a spell of sitting around, not knowing what comes next.
“All Summer Long” by Kid Rock (2008)
Is it a sin to put a Kid Rock song on a list of classics? Maybe. It’s a lot newer than the rest, so it may seem silly. But I’ll stick by it, because it fits right in with “Summer of ’69” and has all the sights and feelings of summer. “All Summer Long” came from Kid Rock’s 2007 album Rock n Roll Jesus and went to radio as a single in March 2008. It’s built on pieces of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”
It peaked at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 on airplay alone, because Kid Rock hadn’t put his catalog up for legal digital download yet. In the UK it reached No. 1 in August 2008 and went platinum. In the US the RIAA certified it Gold. The song looks back at 1989, caught somewhere between a boy and a man, at a summer by the lake with friends. It’s a loose, carefree song, an ode to being a teenager and goofing around. We were all teenagers once.
The turn at the end mixes sadness with admission. The seasons change, summer gives way to fall, and the days that felt endless turn out not to have been. Still, those days stay in memory, and you can go back to them whenever you need them. If you’re still in a summer mood, our list of summer blockbusters makes a good next stop. All six of these songs are really about the person you were during one particular summer.
FAQ: Classic Summer Songs
What year did Summer of ’69 come out?
Bryan Adams recorded “Summer of ’69” for his 1984 album “Reckless,” and it came out as a single on May 27, 1985, the fourth from that album. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Adams has said the “69” stands for coming of age rather than a real year in his life.
Was Here Comes the Sun ever a single?
Not in the UK or US when “Abbey Road” came out in 1969. “Something” was the single from that album instead. In Japan it appeared in 1970 as the B-side of “Oh! Darling.” Decades later it reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart in 2019, the Beatles’ first top-ten hit on that chart.
Why is Dock of the Bay considered a landmark song?
Otis Redding recorded it shortly before he died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. Released the following January, it became the first posthumous No. 1 single in the US and stayed on top for four weeks. It later won two Grammy Awards and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.
How well did Kid Rock’s All Summer Long chart?
It peaked at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2008 on radio airplay alone, since Kid Rock’s catalog wasn’t sold as digital downloads at the time. In the UK it went to No. 1 in August 2008. It was certified Gold in the US and Platinum in the UK.