The Fool

This Marla Cannon-Goodman, Gene Ellsworth and Charley Stefl penned ballad was released on May 19, 1997 as the second single from her self-titled debut album. The song peaked at #2 on the country chart, becoming Womack's first top five song on the tally.

The poignant lyric finds Womack singing about an encounter with a woman who once was in a relationship with her partner. She tells the woman, with her heart in her throat, that her man still loves her.

This originated from another song that Marla Cannon-Goodman and Gene Ellsworth had written which was wasn't any good apart from having a great melody. Cannon Goodman recalled to The Boot: "I was driving down Music Row, and someone pulled out in front of me one day. It had probably been four or five months since we had written that song, and that tape flew out from under my seat; it was an actual cassette. I was like, 'What is this?' and all it said was 'melody."' So when I put it in my player, the melody started playing, and it was just us humming along with the melody. The Hall of Fame was still on the corner of the roundabout at that time, and I was right there, in front of that, and when I heard that melody line, that idea popped into my head out of thin air. I like to call it one of those 'God gifts.' All the way home, I was singing it to myself over and over again, because it was before cell phones; all I had was a beeper at the time. I was saying it over and over in my head: 'I'm the fool in love with the fool who's still in love with you.' By the time I got home, I was like, 'Does that even make any sense?' I called Gene, and I said, "Tell me if this makes sense to you: 'I'm the fool in love with the fool who's still in love with you.'" And he goes, 'Yeah. It's a girl who's in love with a guy who's in love with somebody else.' I said, 'Exactly!' And I sang it to him, and he said, 'What is that?' and I said, 'It's the melody we had on that song we wrote a few months ago.' The next time Gene and I were writing, the next time we got together, we were with Charlie Stefl. It's funny, because Charlie is actually the first person I sat in a room and wrote a song with, so it ended up being really cool. We were throwing around ideas, and I said, 'What about that melody thing?' and we all sat in my garage and wrote it."