In 1970, Three Dog Night had a major hit with “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)”—but it wasn’t an easy sell.
The song, penned by Randy Newman, features a catchy piano riff, rock and blues rhythm, and lyrics about a mother’s warning. “Mama Told Me” became Three Dog Night’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and remains one of the legendary band’s signature songs 56 years later.
But originally it was not a favorite of bandmates Chuck Negron, Danny Hutton, Michael Allsup, Jimmy Greenspoon, Joe Schermie and Floyd Sneed. It was lead vocalist Cory Wells who pushed hard to record the song.
“’Mama Told Me (Not to Come)’ was a tune that I had been doing before Three Dog Night, when I still had my old group in Arizona,” Wells once said of the song, per Super Seventies. “I used to buy all these bizarre records… and one of them was a Randy Newman album. On it was ‘Mama Told Me,’ and I became a tremendous fan.”
“When I brought the song to the other guys, they didn’t like it,” he continued. “They hated it. Matter of fact, it took me three albums for them to accept it. I kept saying, ‘Please listen to this song. It’s a hit song. Man, will you please listen to it?’ And they said, ‘Cory, it just doesn’t have it.’ …I pushed so hard for ‘Mama Told Me.’”
The band finally agreed to work on the song and added what they wanted to it, and the rest is history.
In an interview posted by Mix Online, Hutton recalled not loving the song—at first.
“I don’t remember when I first heard ‘Mama,’ but Cory says that he tried to get us to record it for three albums before he was able to wear us down!” the singer shared. “Randy’s publishing company used to send us a lot of demos, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t bowled over when I heard the song for the first time.”
“When we fleshed it out in rehearsal, it started to come together, but besides Cory, the rest of us remained lukewarm until we actually got down to tracking it. By the time we’d finished making the record, though, we knew we had something special,” he added.
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Interestingly, Newman hadn’t been a Three Dog Night fan at first either. According to Songfacts, he initially thought of them as a “teeny bopper” band but later thanked them for recording their version of his song.
Wells once said that after “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” hit No. 1 on the charts, Newman called him and said, “I just want to thank you for putting my kids through college.”
Wells died in 2015. More than five decades after convincing his bandmates to record the song, “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” remains a career-defining classic for Three Dog Night, a beloved fan favorite that has stood the test of time.
Related: 1971 Three Dog Night Song, Rejected by The Carpenters, Became a Hit That’s Still Loved 55 Years Later
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