One of the all time great love songs is If You Were a Bluebird by Butch Hancock. Hancock is an amazing yet relatively unknown songwriter. I learned about him and this song by being a Joe Ely fan.

I love the fact that Butch and Joe have been friends for decades, along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. They have solo careers but they also write songs for each other and they play together as the Flatlanders.

This post’s title comes from the lyrics:

If you were a hotel
Honey, you'd be a grand one
But if you hit a slow spell
Do you think you could stand one?

Here are two versions of the song, the first as performed by all three of the guys. Hancock is the one in the hat.

The second version is the way I learned it  – the Ely version. The video has a couple annoyances but the performance outweighs them.