The Story Behind The Song: “A Woman In Love”

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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.

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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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