“A Woman in Love”
Ronnie Milsap
Written by Doug Millett and Curtis Wright
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
November 24, 1989
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
December 23 – December 30, 1989
Ronnie Milsap fully embraced the emerging nineties country sound on “A Woman in Love,” a remarkable adaption for an artist who had already navigated so many changes in the genre in the seventies and eighties.
He was less successful updating his ideas. “A Woman in Love” is catchy and easy to sing along with, but hearing a grown woman referred to as both a lady and a child is pretty patronizing for late 1989. It’s not offensive or anything like that. It’s just too simple minded to keep up with the sophisticated records about relationships that were flooding the airwaves from Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Keith Whitley, Randy Travis, Rodney Crowell, and Ricky Van Shelton.
So even though he sounds like his newest contemporaries, he comes off as more out of date than he did on his previous album that hadn’t let go of the trends from earlier in the decade.
Ronnie Milsap’s run of No. 1 singles continues into the nineties with the next single from this album.
“A Woman in Love” gets a B.
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I can agree with this characterization. “A Woman in Love” had a sound quality from 1991 and lyrics from 1977. Perhaps Ronnie will take care of her “whether she likes it or not”! The Urban Cowboy version of Ronnie Milsap was definitely my favorite but he sells this as the most contemporary-sounding of the four singles from his “Stranger Things Have Happened” album, and hinted at continued relevance into the 90s. But curiously, Ronnie returned to late 80s form again with his next album, which didn’t produce any #1 hits but did produce his four final top-10 hits in 1991 and 1992, most of them throwbacks to the “Lost in the Fifties Tonight” template that defined the later years of his career. But “A Woman in Love” was the only hit of Ronnie’s career that I thought fit right in with the “Hot New Country” era.
Grade: B+
A master of the mainstream, Milsap knew how to keep his finger on the pulse of what would work on country music radio. He was an elder statesman who was still in the game at the end of the decade. Many of his peers could no longer say the same.
Still, a slight drift is evident in his departure from the best of what is happening with the younger stars.
From Haggard to Nelson to Milsap, these must have been difficult years to navigate.
How wonderful the late ’80s and ’90s were for county music is all a matter of perspective.