Songfacts®:

• This is one of the most passionate and soulful songs ever written about cheating. Written by the Stax songwriters Homer Banks, Ray Jackson and Carl Hampton, "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" finds a married man with two children enthralled with his mistress. Despite warnings from his friends, he just can't help the way he feels, and is compelled to be with the other woman.
• Banks, Jackson and Hampton wrote the song in the middle of the night sometime around 1970. They had the Stax girl-group The Emotions record the song, but their uptempo version didn't work and the song sat on the shelf until the R&B singer Luther Ingram found the tape while visiting the Stax studios in Memphis. He took the tape and worked out a more mournful arrangement with a gospel feel. Then he recorded the song at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama, utilizing a Wurlitzer piano with an Echoplex unit, and also a Hammond organ. The song became a #1 R&B hit for Ingram.
• Millie Jackson used this song as the basis for her 1974 landmark album Caught Up, where she sang the first side of the album from the perspective of the mistress and the second side as the wife who was being cheated on. In a 2010 Songfacts interview with Millie Jackson, she said: "When I write a story like that, I like to balance it out so people on both sides can see what's going on. That's why I did the wife and the girlfriend. And when I do my live performances, the women were always my biggest fans, but now I do both. I talk about the women, and then I go and I talk about the men, which the women expect me to do, but then I'll talk about the men and the women, so it can be balanced out that way. Try to keep it on an even keel."
• Other big names to cover this song include Isaac Hayes, Barbara Mandrell, Rod Stewart and Cassandra Wilson. Mandrell's version charted at #31 in the US in 1979.