In 1971, Three Dog Night had a major hit with “An Old Fashioned Love Song”—and it came after an iconic musical duo passed on it. Written by one of the era’s most respected songwriters, the song became a defining Three Dog Night hit that remains a soft rock classic 55 years later.
Penned by Paul Williams, “An Old Fashioned Love Song” featured a gentle piano melody and simple lyrics about the warm feeling of romantic love. The song, which appeared on Three Dog Night’s album Harmony, reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1971.
Williams wrote the song while he was on a date.
“I had a date one night with a young lady named Patti Dahlstrom,” he told Songfacts in an interview. “She was a songwriter. We were going to go out and have dinner. And right before I left for the date, I had gotten a phone call that I had a gold record. And I walked into her house, and I said, ‘Well, got a gold record for such-and-such, it just went gold. Kid did it again with another old-fashioned love song.’ It just came out of me.”
“I went, ‘Wait a minute,’” Williams recalled. “I went over to her piano and I sat down, and it’s the quickest I ever had a song come out of me. And it sounds like it. It’s a really simple song, I wrote it in like 20 minutes. And it was a big hit.”
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Williams originally sent the song to The Carpenters, who previously recorded his song “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
“It’s the fastest that any song has ever come out of me,” Williams told Music Radar. “It just poured out of me, and I sent it to Richard Carpenter. I thought it was perfect for The Carpenters, but I don’t think he listened to it past the first verse. We sent it to Three Dog Night, and they reluctantly recorded it.”
Three Dog Night’s song featured Chuck Negron on lead vocals—mainly because the band’s co-lead vocalists Cory Wells and Danny Hutton wanted nothing to do with it.
“I told Paul I would record that song, because I knew I could make it the romantic ballad that he wanted,” Negron told Goldmine magazine in 2021. “Then I was at a Three Dog Night listening session and the publishing company sent the song in, unbeknownst to Paul. I just listened and neither Danny or Cory said a word, which would mean no. I said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and they said, ‘Oh, okay.’ We had faith in one another. I was worried that one of them was going to say that they wanted to do it, when I already promised Paul that I would sing it. Everything would usually go smoothly with us, unless more than one of us wanted to sing lead on the same song.”
Despite the hesitation, the hit wasn’t totally unexpected. While Three Dog Night liked to experiment with different musical styles, it was songs like “An Old Fashioned Love Song” that fared the best on the charts.
In an interview with Motif, Hutton noted, “If you look at our albums, probably at least three songs on each album are nasty, metal, funk, screaming songs. And, it was always, you know, the ‘An Old Fashioned Love Song’ that was going to be the hit. But we could do any kind of music.”
Fifty-five years after its release, “An Old Fashioned Love Song” still resonates with listeners. What started out as a simple composition for The Carpenters became one of Three Dog Night’s most beloved and enduring hits.
Related: 1970 Classic Rock One-Hit Wonder Was Written ‘On the Spot’ Just Before Band Broke Up
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