(written by Doug Millett & Curtis Wright)
Ronnie Milsap (#1, 1989)
The
1980s closed out on an “up” note for both Ronnie Milsap and a former
Vern Gosdin associate, Curtis Wright. Milsap earned his 35th and final
Billboard number one single, putting him fourth on the all-time list
behind Merle Haggard’s 38, Conway Twitty’s 40 and George Strait’s 44
(the official, authentic and accurate Billboard count).
Number
thirty-five for Milsap came with “A Woman In Love,” the first song
written by Curtis Wright to reach the summit. A Pennsylvania native,
Wright moved to Nashville in January of 1987 and soon picked up a job
with Vern Gosdin’s road band, playing guitar and bass and singing
harmony. Curtis also joined his boss on the critically-acclaimed “Alone”
album, providing back-up vocals on Gosdin’s hits “I’m Still Crazy” and
“That Just About Does It.”
Wright resigned from Vern’s band in
December of 1989, the same month that he earned his first number one
song, “A Woman In Love,” which was composed during his first year in
Nashville. Wright and his friend Doug Millett got together to go over
song ideas like they had done many times before. Millett brought out
this “road map” of a song (as Curtis called it), the nucleus for “A
Woman In Love.” Wright admitted that the material initially didn’t do a
whole lot for him, but he agreed to work on it with Millett.
To
Curtis’s surprise, after the two men sat down and started to get into
the thing, it opened up like a book. They hashed out a melody, then a
couple of verses, a chorus and a bridge and there it was! “A Woman In
Love” was born. But at the time, Earl Thomas Conley had “What She Is (Is
A Woman In Love)” near the top of the charts and Wright felt that their
song was at least two or three years away from anyone doing something
with it.
However, Curtis was incorrect. “A Woman In Love” was
soon published by a company co-owned by Elvis Presley’s former piano
player, David Briggs, and Ronnie Milsap quickly snapped it up. Wright
never imagined that Ronnie would take to his composition, considering
the artist and the song an illogical matchup. Curtis was wrong about
that, too, and buoyed by Milsap’s first supporting video since “Lost In
The Fifties Tonight” four years earlier, “A Woman In Love” soared to the
number one position on Billboard’s country singles chart December 23,
1989.
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