Axton, Hoyt

Folk music singer-songwriter Hoyt Axton, with a distinctive bass-baritone, was the son of a football-coach father and song writing English-teacher mother, Mae Boron Axton (she co-wrote Elvis Presley’s 1956 first hit, Heartbreak Hotel). He was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, but the family soon moved to Comanche in the same state; then in 1949 it went to Jacksonville, Florida, where Hoyt’s father, now a naval officer on the U.S.S. Princeton, was stationed. He got a football scholarship at Oklahoma State University and had been considering an athletic career, but left early and enlisted in the Navy instead. After discharge from the Navy, he headed west and began singing in San Francisco nightclubs; he had studied piano as a teen, later switching to guitar. He recorded his first album in the early 60s and many more during the 70s; he also sang and composed commercials and began making TV and film appearances. In 1978 he formed his own record label, Jeremiah, which did not last. He struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction (noted in several of his songs), and had several unsuccessful marriages. Despite this busy career, his most notable successes were songs he wrote that others made famous; these included the Kingston Trio’s rendition of his song “Greenback Dollar” (1963) and Three Dog Night’s performance of his “Joy to the World” that topped the charts for 6 weeks, the top hit of 1971. Dozens of artists covered his songs over the next decades: Steppenwolf, Ringo Starr, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, John Denver, Anne Murray. It was this legacy of song writing rather than his 45 film and movie appearances, or his own singing, that will be remembered. He was confined to a wheelchair after a stroke in 1995, and he and his fourth wife were arrested in 1997 for marijuana possession. In 1999, poor health led to two heart attacks, the second of which he did not survive. Both he and his mother were posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in Muskogee in 2007.