I Wouldn’t Change You If I Could

The words are a husband’s declaration to his wife that he would change nothing about her. Her eyes, her lips and her smile stay as they are, she is everything he could wish for, and the one thing he would alter, he says, is her name.

Ricky Skaggs recorded it for the Epic album Highways & Heartaches (1982) and released it as a single in January 1983. It was his fourth number one on the country chart, spending one week at the top and twelve weeks on the chart in all, and it also reached number one on the Canadian RPM country chart.

The Skaggs hit raised the question of who wrote the song. Arthur Q. Smith, a Knoxville songwriter, was known to have sold many of his songs outright to pay bar tabs, and he is now credited as the true author. He is said to have sold this one to Eanes and to have sold half to Paul H. Jones, keeping the other half. After the Skaggs record appeared, Smith’s widow, Lillian Pritchett, sued the publisher; because Eanes could not show proof that he had bought the song, the credit was moved from his name to Smith’s estate and Jones. Eanes maintained until his death that he had written it.