By 1971, Three Dog Night already had several hits to their credit, including their 1970 single, “Mama Told Me Not To Come”, which became their first song to reach No. 1. The band had no idea when they released their first single of 1971 and their second song from their fourth studio album, Naturally, that they were about to release a song that is still being sung more than 50 years later.
Three Dog Night kicked off the year by releasing “Joy To The World”. The humorous song was written by Hoyt Axton and Three Dog Night’s Chuck Negron. But before the version that fans know all over the world was written, an earlier version was first written by Axton and pitched to another hit rock band: Steppenwolf.
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Axton was no stranger to Steppenwolf. In fact, Axton wrote “The Pusher”, a song on Steppenwolf’s self-titled freshman record, which was later used in the 1969 hit film, Easy Rider. But when Steppenwolf’s lead singer, John Kay, heard “Joy To The World”, which begins with, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog / Was a good friend of mine,” Kay immediately lost interest.
“I heard it more like a children’s song, with ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog,’” Kay tells Songfacts. “Three Dog Night had an enormous hit with it, but I could not see myself doing that song. It wasn’t me.”
The Story Behind “Joy To The World” by Three Dog Night
Steppenwolf didn’t hear the potential in “Joy To The World”, but Axton was undeterred — and persistent. Fortunately, Axton’s persistence paid off.
“What happened was that Hoyt Axton had come to the studio and pitched ‘Joy To The World’ to the band, and they turned it down,” Negron recounts to Forbes. “I wasn’t there. Then Hoyt came back, pitched it again, and they turned him down again. Again, I wasn’t there. Hoyt came in yet another time, and this time I was there. He had had a couple of drinks, and the band started poking fun at him. I felt bad that they were treating him like that.”
Negron admits he didn’t know that Axton had already tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get Three Dog Night to record “Joy To The World” when he asked him to play the song again.
“When he started, I liked it immediately,” Negron recounts. “I thought we could have some fun with it. So I told him to leave a demo. We had some free time later, so we started jamming ‘Joy’ for fun.” We didn’t have to be so cool all of the time, right? That opening line had to be screamed. Did that guy just say, ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog?’”
Not surprisingly, Cory Wells and Danny Hutton, the band members who first turned the song down, took a while to warm up to the idea. But once they started singing along, they realized the potential in “Joy To The World”. The song became a six-week No. 1 single for Three Dog Night.
Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage
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