Sometimes news can travel very quickly, and at other times it doesn’t travel quickly enough.

I’ve just learned that singer / songwriter Luther Ingram passed away on March 19, succumbing to heart failure after years of battling diabetes and related kidney disease. He was 69.

You won’t find any Luther Ingram records in the Stax library, and to tell the truth he never actually recorded for the label. But Ingram left specific, indelible fingerprints on Stax, both as a songwriter and a singer. So even though he never signed a Stax contract, he might be considered one of the label’s most important “first cousins.”

Luther Ingram was born in 1937 about one hundred miles from Memphis in Jackson, Tennessee. After formative years singing in a family vocal group based in Illinois, then working with rock & roll pioneers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in New York, he headed back home. He bounced around a few small independent labels and wound up on KoKo Records, based near Memphis.

Ingram connected to Stax when Koko Records signed a deal for Stax distribution in 1969. He hooked up with Stax in-house songwriter Sir Mack Rice, who already had a hit to his credit with Wilson Pickett’s hard-driving “Mustang Sally” (and later penned “Cheaper to Keep Her” for Johnnie Taylor). Their partnership produced “Respect Yourself,” one of the Staples Singers’ - and Stax’s - biggest hits.

In 1972, Ingram recorded his masterpiece “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right.” It sold over one million copies through the Stax distribution network and climbed to #3 on the Pop singles chart. It proved so popular that Stax made sure it appeared in both the Wattstax movie documentary and accompanying soundtrack even though Ingram didn’t even perform at the Los Angeles benefit concert, by arranging to record Ingram singing on a soundstage before an appreciative audience. “If Loving You Is Wrong” was subsequently covered by soul legends like The Drifters, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Isaac Hayes and Percy Sledge, but even up against such heavyweights, Ingram’s smoldering original remains the definitive version.

I’ll be the first to admit that this blog entry reads and feels somewhat hollow. But I keep coming back to this: Luther Ingram’s performance of “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right” has moved countless hearts, including and especially my own. Writing about Mr. Ingram now is at least something, and something is almost always better than nothing. If the life of a soulful songwriter and singer cannot be honored here, then where? If not us, by whom? And if not now, then when?

I’m sorry this came so late, Mr. Ingram, too late for this to do you any good, but thank you so very much for such a great, great song.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.