Luther Ingram was born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1937. He sang in a gospel group (with two of his brothers) while still in his teens, which later became the Gardenias, as they turned to secular music.
Ingram recorded his first solo single in 1965, but things didn’t start to look up until he was signed to Ko Ko Records by Johnny Baylor in the late sixties and moved to Memphis. Baylor signed a distribution deal with Stax Records in 1969 and immediately Luther Ingram achieved chart success with “Pity for the Lonely” and then “My Honey and Me”.
Over the next eighteen years, he released seventeen more singles, all of which entered the R&B charts in the USA. The most successful of his songs was “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” in 1972, which rose to number three in the Pop chart and hit number one on the R&B chart.
The single spent eighteen weeks in the Hot 100, selling around four million copies overall. The song was written by Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Raymond Jackson, one of Stax Records’ songwriting teams, and was originally recorded by the Emotions.
Ingram heard the song at Stax, when Veda Brown sang her version, and he decided to record it himself, not at Stax but in Alabama at Muscle Shoals. The song was recorded in under an hour! Ingram slowed the original tempo and added a Wurlitzer organ and a wah-wah guitar. Ingram has described the session: “Barry Beckett played the organ, did exactly what I needed, Shelton Clayton played the Wurlitzer with an Echoplex to get the real shrill vibrations. Jimmy Johnson was on rhythm guitar, he put his fills in. With the other guitar player [Pete Carr], I said, “I need some tears”, so he got a crybaby wah-wah. And Roger Hawkins played the drums.” (Pierre Perrone, The Independent, UK Newspaper, 7th April 2007).
Ingram’s manager, Johnny Baylor, was now working at Stax as a sales manager, so he was able to make sure that Ingram’s single had maximum support. It is no surprise to see how many artists have picked up the song since Ingram took it to the top of the R&B chart. In the UK it has been recorded by Rod Stewart and Tom Jones. In America, the best-known versions are those by Barbara Mandrell, Millie Jackson and Isaac Hayes.
Ingram had further success in the following year, when “I’ll Be Your Shelter (In Time of Storm)” reached number forty on the Pop chart and number nine on the R&B chart. Unfortunately, he was unable to match this level of success in subsequent years, as Ko Ko Records ran into financial difficulties.
During the seventies, Ingram was also working at Stax as a songwriter, however, and this brought him one major hit too. In 1971 he teamed up with Mack Rice to write “Respect Yourself” for the Staple Singers, triggering the idea for the song by his comment: “…black folk need to learn to respect themselves”.
Ingram’s last release was “I Like the Feeling” in 1992. He died in 2007.
Ace Records (UK) issued two albums (2007 and 2008) which together comprise all Ingram’s single recordings at Ko Ko.
