‘Grandma’ Singer Dr. Elmo Is Having The Last Laugh
Our readers’ comments about the song were unmerciful. NRG Media director of programming Jeff Winfield said, “Elmo & Patsy deserve a special place in hell.” Nine North Records president Larry Pareigis was especially colorful, calling the song “the bullet train of musical suck” and saying, “Elmo & Patsy is a flat-ass run to the finish line of recorded Christmas crap, no competitors even close.”
One person who, surprisingly, found these comments amusing was Dr. Elmo Shropshire, the “Elmo” of Elmo and Patsy fame. (Patsy is his ex-wife.) He calls Pareigis’ comment “one of my all-time favorites.” In fact, he’s rather used to such comments. They have been coming in a steady stream since the song first charted on Billboard’s country singles chart in 1983 after Elmo and Patsy shot a $30,000 video for it in their living room, which got picked up by MTV. (The song was first released in 1979.)
But the good-natured Shropshire is having the last laugh. He’s built a successful cottage industry around the song, including an animated feature, licensing deals with films, musical plush toys, Hallmark ornaments and greeting cards, and a gold-certified ring tone. Now, he’s gone high tech with a brand new “Grandma” app for iPhone and iPad that includes such features as a fruitcake skeet-shooting game and a Santa satellite tracker.
Plus, he continues to do scores of radio interviews every holiday season—well over 100 last year—and performances at many stations’ holiday shows. He’s so in demand for holiday phoners, that he has them booked every 15 minutes in morning drive time during the holiday season, often starting as early a 3 a.m. since he lives on the West coast.
Still, Shropshire’s wife and manager Pam Wendell calls the ubiquitous novelty song “a career-stopping hit,” despite that fact that it has sold 11 million copies. Turns out, Dr. Elmo is actually a talented bluegrass musician. (The “Dr.” is a title he comes by honestly. He was a practicing veterinarian before the success of his novelty song.) His latest project, “Bluegrass Christmas,” was just released on Time Life and is getting great reviews for its mix of original material and holiday standards.
Nevertheless, it’s hard for the gifted banjo player with a singing voice reminiscent of Del McCoury to get any traction on his real music career when all any interviewer wants to ask him are questions like “Does Grandma really die,” “What happened to Patsy,” (they divorced 25 years ago) and “Where did you get the idea for the song?” (For the record, Shropshire’s friend Randy Brooks actually wrote it, although Shropshire has written about 100 other songs, many of them novelties since that’s what people came to expect from him.)
And he can’t get away from “Grandma.” Whenever he has recorded other albums, labels have generally insisted that some version of that song be included. The new Time Life CD has an instrumental version.
As ubiquitous as “Grandma” is this time of year, there are still radio holdouts. Shropshire says one radio programmer in San Francisco refuses to play it because his own grandmother died at Christmastime (although, presumably, not because of a reindeer). Shropshire’s hoping that programmer might consider playing the “less offensive” instrumental version this season.
Shropshire, who grew up on horse and tobacco farms in his native Kentucky, helped popularize bluegrass in the Bay Area as host of the popular weekend radio show “The Great San Francisco Bluegrass Experience” on KSAY from 1969-1971.
“When we started out, we didn’t have very good ratings,” he says of his early radio career. “Our sponsors were mostly the clubs where we were playing. After a couple of years, we were first or second in the market. Then we started getting beer companies, Coca-Cola and other sponsors like that; bona fide sponsors.”
Still, he recalls, “We certainly weren’t professional radio people at the time. I didn’t know what I was doing. I used to read the commercials, and make a mistake in every commercial I read, or forget to say the sponsor’s name. I’d read a commercial and suddenly everyone would start clapping in the audience because they knew I made a mistake.”
Undeterred, he later did a veterinary call-in show in San Francisco for a few years. He gave up his practice 15 years ago to focus on music.
After struggling as a musician for years, Shropshire was initially thrilled when “Grandma” took off. “When it first came out I was really excited because I thought, ‘This is the break I needed in our career,’” he says. “Patsy and I were performing and touring everywhere. We were known as a good act, but once the ‘Grandma’ song came out, after that when people would think about hiring us, instead of thinking about hiring an act that was well rounded with a fair amount of music and comedy, most people would think, ‘If I hire them, is he just going to sing ‘Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer’ over and over for 45 minutes?’ It hurt my performing career.”
His new “Bluegrass Christmas” CD was not only a labor of love, but provided some measure of “vindication,” he says. “For years and years I scraped to have a hit.” And while he admits, “It’s much better than not having one,” he says, “for years now when I’m going to perform, people only want to hear that one song. You’re pretty pigeonholed as far as doing anything else. On the new album, we did this version of ‘Greensleeves’ that’s kind of a banjo, guitar and Dobro instrumental, and all the bluegrass people that have reviewed it seem to like that cut. It just makes me feel great that people could recognize something else I’m doing.”
Shropshire notes the irony that while ‘Grandma’ is widely panned, it’s also one of the most covered songs of all time. Most of the approximately 1,000 takes on the song currently on YouTube are unlicensed versions for which Shropshire and the songwriter are not even compensated. He says it started being parodied almost immediately after its release in 1979.
“When it came out the San Francisco 49ers were the worst team in the league, so somebody immediately [created] ‘The 49ers Got Run Over By A Reindeer,’” he says. Today, there are versions called “Osama Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” “Obama Got Run Over … ,” “GM Got Run Over … ,” “New Kids [On The Block] Got Run Over … ,” and even “Grammar Got Run Over … ,” among many others.
“It seems to really lend itself to being parodied,” says Shropshire, who says he’s been in litigation with various parties for 10 years just to stay on top of it all. “Anybody who has a hit song wants to protect their copyright,” he says. “The legal expenses in protecting it are almost as much as what you make from it.”
Despite the frustrations, the song has been a Christmas gift that keeps on giving. “Every year on Dec. 26 I would think the bottom would drop out,” Shropshire says. “Then I would kind of forget about it. Then, as Christmas would be coming the next year, I’d think, ‘I wonder if anyone will remember it.’ Probably for 10 years I didn’t expect it to be popular the next year, and it just kept coming back. I’m still a little surprised.”
Unlike Grandma, he says, “It just seems like the song that wouldn’t die.”
