This song finds Swift singing about the romantic adventures of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy after coming across a photo of the pair dancing when they were teenagers. "She told The Wall Street Journal: "I get a lot of style inspiration from the 1960s, so I'll go and look at black and white pictures, and look at [photos from the] '50s and '60s, and I came across this picture of these two kids dancing at a dance. It immediately made me think of like how much fun they must have had that night. It was back in the late '40s. I ended up reading underneath that it was Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. And they were like 17. So I just kind of wrote that song from that place, not really knowing how they met or anything like that. And then her daughter Rory ended up coming to a show a couple weeks later and I told her about the song and she was like, you have to meet my mom. She would love to meet you. So that was kind of what that song was about."
Ethel and Bobby are the grandparents of Conor Kennedy, whom Taylor was dating whilst writing for Red. The songstress became especially close to Ethel Kennedy during their relationship.
This was co-produced by regular collaborator Nathan Chapman and Dann Huff, who has also worked with Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts. It was one of three tracks on Red, where Huff co-manned the boards. "I chose the artists and the producers because I like their style," Swift told USA Today. "I didn't choose them because I wanted to force my style on them; I chose them because I wanted to learn from them. So they're true collaborations, it's not just somebody else singing on one of my songs that sounds like one of my songs. It's a real mixture of the two influences."
