Three Dog Night Singer Chuck Negron Dies at 83

“Joy to the World,” written by Hoyt Axton, shared the title and little else with the 18th-century English hymn. Axton’s novelty anthem was a secular blessing — “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me” — with carefree asides about women, rainbow-riding and the friendship of a wine-guzzling bullfrog named Jeremiah. According to Negron, the other singers had twice turned down “Joy to the World” in his absence before Axton played him a demo.

“When he started, I liked it immediately. I thought we could have some fun with it,” Negron told Forbes.com in 2022. “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’? I got up the scale to D, which is pretty high, and just screamed it out. When the band heard that, they went, ‘Holy crap, that’s great.‘”

No one seemed to care what “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” was supposed to mean; it became a catchphrase of the era. “Joy to the World” outsold all other songs in 1971, received two Grammy nominations and lived on through oldies radio stations and movie soundtracks, notably for The Big Chill and Forrest Gump. The song caught on so fast, and for so long, that Three Dog Night performed it at back-to-back Grammy ceremonies.

Their other hits included “Black and White,” “Celebrate,” “Shambala” and “Easy to Be Hard.” But by the mid-1970s, the band was burned out, feuding and self-destructing. They broke up in 1976, attempted the occasional reunion and settled in as an oldies act, with Hutton the only remaining original singer. Wells died in 2015, while Negron had dropped out for good in the mid-1980s, when his drug problems led to his being fired.

Negron would call his memoir, published in 1998 and reissued 20 years later, Three Dog Nightmare. Chapter titles included “Making Millions and Stoned All the Time” and “Threw Up My Guts and Loved It.”

After decades of estrangement between him and Hutton, the two men reconciled last year.

Born Charles Negron II in 1942, he was a New York City native who was still a toddler when his parents broke up: For a time, Negron lived in a foster home because his mother couldn’t afford to raise him and his twin sister, Nancy. He initially dreamed of playing basketball, but his life changed in adolescence when his best friend convinced him to try singing. He won a school talent show, and was soon singing professionally, at the Apollo and other venues around New York.

After graduating from Hancock, a junior college in Santa Maria, California, Negron performed in clubs in Los Angeles and met Wells and Hutton, whose friends included Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. They nearly signed with the Beach Boys’ Brothers Records before Wilson’s bandmates, worried that their leader was using up his talents elsewhere, intervened. Negron, Wells and Hutton ended up at ABC-Dunhill, and recruited a backing band, including Floyd Sneed on drums, Joe Schermie on bass and Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards.

In his post-Three Dog Night years, Negron released several solo albums, including Joy to the World and Long Road Back, a companion to his memoir, and otherwise dedicated himself to helping others struggling with substance abuse. Before cleaning up in the 1990s — Sept. 17, 1991 — he had been so addicted to heroin and other drugs that he nearly died numerous times, lost his family and all of his money and descended from a luxurious villa in Hollywood Hills to sleeping on a mattress in a vacant lot.

“That’s what drugs do. I don’t care if it gives you a hit song. What does it matter?” he told smashinginterviews.com. “The point is not if it helps you create, the point is it kills you! Are you willing to die because you wanted to try drugs to try a new experience? That’s the question. I’m in a town here where there are many who ain’t the same and never will be.”

In his later years, Negron toured despite suffering with chronic COPD for three decades. ​In 2017, he told AARP he was able to perform with the disease by using eyeglass frames that concealed oxygen tubes that ran into his nose. “You don’t have to let a medical condition dictate how your life is going to be,” he said. ​

However, the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined him permanently.​

Negron was married four times, most recently to his manager, Ami Albea Negron, and he is survived by five children His previous wives include Julie Densmore, former wife of drummer John Densmore of the Doors.