“I Wouldn’t Change You If I Could” has a tangled authorship history. The country singer Jim Eanes recorded it in 1959 and was long credited as its writer, but the song is now generally attributed to Arthur Q. Smith, a gifted Knoxville songwriter known for quietly selling his compositions outright to other performers, often for very little money.
The lyric is a tender love song — an unusual one for its era in being content rather than heartbroken, the singer declaring that, faults and all, he would not change his beloved in any way. That warmth gave the song a wide and lasting appeal.
The song became a major hit decades later for Ricky Skaggs, who took it to number one on the country chart in the early 1980s as part of his run of traditional-leaning crossover successes. When the Skaggs version proved a hit, a legal dispute over the song’s true authorship led to the credit being moved to Smith’s estate. The version heard here is Skaggs’s, from his album “Highways and Heartaches.”
