It's easy to think of Cody Johnson as an overnight success: His 2018 single "On My Way to You" roared up the Billboard charts, becoming the singer's first song to crack the Top 20. However, that track was by no means Johnson's first try at stardom; rather, the 32-year-old singer has been touring since 2006, when he was a teenager. 

In fact, Johnson says, he got his first taste of what it was like to hear his song come on country radio back in those early days of his career as a performer. The first of his own songs he heard on the airwaves was "Texas Kind of Way," a track included on his 2009 album Six Strings One Dream.

With a little bit of help from supportive radio DJs -- and a bit of legwork on the singer's part -- Johnson soon heard his song on the radio for a second time. Read on to learn about those early experiences, as told by Johnson himself.

I was a kid, man. I was, like, 18 years old, and Sean Ericson played me on Kix 105, out of Lufkin, Nacogdoches, [Texas]. And I cried.

And the next time [I heard myself on the radio], I was with my buddy Jared Morris out of 101 Huntsville, and I was actually in the studio. I went in there and brought my CDs and was like, "Please play this. Please play this."

I don't know [what song they played the first time] -- I can't remember. I think it was called "Texas Kind of Way."

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