Although everybody says "The Great Speckled Bird" is by Roy Acuff, all he did was make the first recording of it. The author was a Rev. Guy Smith, according to Wikipedia (the reference there to Coe's "If That Ain't Country" is also worth noting and chuckling over, and there may actually be exegetical value to the Talk Page's note about squad vs. squab). A four-stanza version is in a shaped-note hymnal I recently acquired, New Hymns of Inspiration, and I have copied the melody line and lyrics from that book out into a PDF, here.

Haruo