If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight) (song)

"If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight)" is a popular song.

The music was written by James P. Johnson, the lyrics by Henry Creamer. The song was published in 1926 and first recorded by Clarence Williams' Blue Five with vocalist Eva Taylor in 1927. It was popularized by the 1930 recording by McKinney's Cotton Pickers, who used it as their theme song.

The song has become a standard, with recordings by many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Kay Starr, and Frank Sinatra. Years after leaving her song-and-dance persona behind at MGM, actress Joan Crawford softly sings a few bars of the song to herself as a down-on-her-luck carnival dancer early in the Warner Bros. classic melodrama Flamingo Road (1949). The film's composer, Max Steiner, expands fragments of the song throughout that film. The song also appears in Casablanca.

This song was whistled and sometimes sung (partially) on a few occasions by Jack Lemmon as "Ensign Pulver" (to himself) during the 1955 film Mister Roberts.