How the Wackiest, Most ‘Annoying’ Christmas Song Became a Hit

It started with a novelty songwriter stranded on a snowy night. Decades later, listeners still can’t get his tune, “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,” out of their heads.

By Steven Kurutz

Published Dec. 13, 2024

NY TIMES

On a cold and snowy night in November 1978, the members of Randy Brooks’s country band, Young Country, found themselves stranded after a gig at the Hyatt Hotel on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. The brakes on their van were frozen. With nowhere to go, Mr. Brooks and his bandmates went back inside to watch the next act, a bluegrass group fronted by the husband-and-wife duo of Elmo Shropshire and Patsy Trigg.

That simple twist of fate would change the fortunes of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Shropshire and Ms. Trigg, and give the world one of the most enduring — and polarizing — Christmas songs ever recorded.

Elmo & Patsy invited Mr. Brooks, then a 30-year-old aspiring songwriter from Dallas, onstage that night to play one of his novelty tunes. He’d written it the year before, after hearing a holiday song by Merle Haggard, “Grandma’s Homemade Christmas Card,” that annoyed him.

“I was tired of that kind of country song, where they set you up to like a relative who gets killed in the third verse,” recalled Mr. Brooks, though Mr. Haggard’s lyrics only implied that the beloved grandmother was deceased. “I thought, it’s more honest to admit that grandma died up front.”

Whenever he played the song, his subversive ditty about a grandmother who gets drunk on eggnog, wanders out in the night and gets killed by Santa’s reindeer, audiences whooped and cheered. Mr. Shropshire and Ms. Trigg, who’d met Mr. Brooks that night, asked him to teach them the song backstage after the show.

“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” which Elmo & Patsy first released independently in 1979, has become as synonymous with the holiday season as week-old fruitcake and re-gifting. In 1983, the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Christmas Hits Singles chart, beating out Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock.” It matched that feat again in 1984 and 1985, and charted on the Holiday 100 as recently as 2016.

Unlike the grandma in the lyrics, “Grandma” the song refuses to die, despite regularly appearing on lists of the weirdest or most hated holiday songs. It showed up in a pivotal scene in the 2005 war drama “Jarhead,” and inspired the title of an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” It has spawned a line of musical toys, Hallmark ornaments, a scratch-off lottery game and an animated TV movie airing next week, as it has every holiday season for more than two decades.

That’s partly due to luck. But the song’s longevity also owes to the tireless promotional efforts of Mr. Shropshire, a retired veterinarian from Northern California. Every December for decades, he has flogged his lone hit by selling self-produced albums, doing call-in interviews with radio D.J.s and performing concerts around the country.

This month, at 88, Dr. Elmo, as he is known, is back on the road as a solo act, playing several shows in New Jersey, whether audiences like it or not.

“It’s kind of the most-hated Christmas song,” Mr. Shropshire said by phone ahead of his seasonal blitz. “One reviewer said it had a menacing hillbilly vibe to it. Another said, ‘Sounds like Santa has a tight grip on his throat.’”

Grandma’ starts to catch on

A few months after Mr. Brooks’s brief encounter with Elmo & Patsy, he received a cassette in the mail of the couple singing his song. They wanted to release “Grandma” as a 45 single.

“That was really exciting because my name was going to be on a record label,” recalled Mr. Brooks, 76, who still plays in bands around Dallas, where he lives. “Nobody other than me had sung one of my songs before.”

At the time, Elmo & Patsy were a regional act, a kind of country Sonny and Cher who bantered onstage between songs. Ms. Trigg was the guitar player, and Mr. Shropshire played banjo. By day, he owned a vet hospital in the Bay Area.

In 1979, the couple pressed 500 copies on their own label, Oink Records, and distributed them locally. Mr. Shropshire had no aspirations other than to make “a cute Christmas gag gift to give to a couple of my friends,” he said.

Nevertheless, the couple sent their recording to Ms. Trigg’s parents in Tennessee, who ran a small music publishing company devoted to gospel and blues, and had the song copyrighted. This move would later prove critical, and lucrative; the Triggs’ company controlled the publishing — and royalties — rather than a record label or manager.

Accounts vary on how, but one way or another a copy of “Grandma” found its way to KSFO radio’s Gene Nelson, an influential San Francisco D.J. who had emceed the Beatles’ final concert, at Candlestick Park. Mr. Nelson played “Grandma” on the radio during the holidays that year, delighting Mr. Shropshire and Ms. Trigg.

The following December, Mr. Nelson played the song again, and a couple of stations taped it from KSFO and gave it airplay as well, Mr. Shropshire said. “Grandma” was beginning to catch on.

In those days, radio was still a local industry, not run by broadcasting conglomerates and algorithms. Ms. Trigg recalled that she and Mr. Shropshire would get calls at home from programmers and D.J.s all over the country who had heard about a song where a grandma gets clobbered by Santa and his sleigh.

“He would get on one phone, I’d get on the other phone and we’d play the song,” said Ms. Trigg, now 77. “That was the only copy the station would have until we sent them one.”

Over the next three years, “Grandma” reached an ever-wider audience during the holidays. Dr. Demento invited Elmo & Patsy to perform it on his popular radio show. The Gray Panthers, an advocacy group for seniors, protested the song, claiming it was ageist and hostile to grandmothers. Some stations refused to play the song, because it annoyed listeners and out of respect for those whose grandmothers had died around the holidays. The controversy and press only fueled its renown.

Mr. Shropshire, who had aspirations for a music career, realized that he may have a hit on his hands. Elmo & Patsy signed a distribution deal with a company called Nationwide Sound to press 250,000 copies of the 45, he said.

In 1983, Mr. Shropshire said, MTV put into heavy rotation the music video that he and Ms. Trigg had spent $30,000 to make and sent to the channel. The video, which was shot in the couple’s home, starred Mr. Shropshire as grandpa and in drag as grandma, playing up the song’s goofiness.

For years, Elmo & Patsy had sent their single to major labels and were ignored. But when “Grandma” hit the Billboard charts and the video began airing on MTV, the labels came calling. Epic Records, home to Michael Jackson, released a full-length holiday album from the duo, titled after the hit song, in November 1984.

By that Christmas, “Grandma” was inescapable.

A carol for shock jocks

Mr. Brooks, who had by this point given up on a music career and had taken a job with American Airlines in the reservations department, recalled the first big royalty check he received, after the song he’d written in a day — starting with the chorus and the first verse, which he had scribbled down in bed — hit No. 1.

“I think I got a check for $16,000,” or almost a year’s salary, Mr. Brooks said. “The first thing I did was I called up four couples that were my closest friends and I took them out to dinner at one of the nicest restaurants in Dallas — with roses for all the ladies and a magnum of champagne.” His date that night became his wife.

It’s not easy to write a Christmas classic. Just ask the countless music superstars who have recorded utterly forgettable holiday songs.

Many of the tunes we hear in department stores this time of year and know by heart, like “The Christmas Song” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” date to the 1940s and ’50s. Only a few songs from the ’80s onward have achieved sing-it-with-your-kids-in-the-car status — notably, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey and “Last Christmas” by Wham!.

Nathan Wang, a composer for film and television who scored the animated special based on the song, said goofy as it may be, “Grandma” shares DNA with some of the classics.

The secret, Mr. Wang said, is its simplicity: “You listen to it once and you’re almost able to sing along by the end.”

And it doesn’t hurt that “Grandma” appeals to the adolescent humor of shock jocks. Playing the song on the radio became a naughty act, an antidote to chestnuts roasting on an open fire and other sentimental images of Christmas. Unsurprisingly, the song’s twisted humor also delighted actual adolescents, another constituency that kept “Grandma” culturally relevant.

As the years went on, “Grandma” became less an assemblage of music and lyrics than a cottage industry for Mr. Shropshire. His commitment to it outlasted Elmo & Patsy: The duo broke up, and the couple divorced in 1990.

“The divorce turned my life upside down,” said Ms. Trigg, who returned home to Tennessee after acting for a few years in Los Angeles and now writes children’s books.

After the couple divorced, “Grandma” became the focus of a contentious legal battle between Mr. Shropshire, Ms. Trigg and her parents, who’d helped them publish the song all those years ago. A judge ruled that henceforth, the publishing of “Grandma” would be split between Mr. Shropshire and Ms. Trigg.

By the early ’90s, the song’s popularity was waning anyway. But that’s when Mr. Shropshire and his current wife, Pam Wendell, hatched a plan to revive it.

Grandma, Inc.

Mr. Shropshire rerecorded “Grandma” for a solo album. It was a way to regain the rights to the master recording, much like Taylor Swift did with her music years later. Then Ms. Wendell hit the pavement, convincing drugstore chains and Dollar General to stock the CD at their checkout counters.

Come Thanksgiving, Mr. Shropshire would wake up at 3 a.m. and do hundreds of promotional phone interviews. He also appeared on national TV programs like “Good Morning America” and later “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where he sang “Grandma” with the Roots.

Then the merchandising started: “Grandma” has been referred to on Hallmark greeting cards and other products for more than 30 years.

The song got yet another life when Fred A. Rappoport, a TV executive and producer who had been involved in “Charlie Brown” and “Looney Tunes” specials, purchased the rights to make an animated Christmas television special. The cartoon first aired on the WB network in 2001 and found a longtime home on CW.

That version is more family friendly: Grandma survives her brush with Santa’s sleigh and is taken to the North Pole to recuperate.

“We were aware there were lyrics like, ‘grandpa is taking this really well,’” said Jim Staahl, one of the cartoon’s writers. “We thought, ‘Let’s not go there.’”

Mr. Shropshire, Ms. Trigg and Mr. Brooks continue to receive royalties from “Grandma” and grant most of the requests that come their way for its use in movies, TV or products.

“Grandma” remains the only song that Mr. Brooks ever placed on a record, aside from the B-side to the Epic Records single, “Percy the Puny Poinsettia.” He’s now retired and plays with a couple of bands around Dallas.

In the streaming era, “Grandma” isn’t as financially lucrative as it once was, nor is it as omnipresent. “Grandma” ranked 179th among the most-streamed holiday songs in the United States in 2023, according to data from Luminate, an analytics firm.

Still, it has had a remarkable run — all based on a chance encounter between an aspiring songwriter and an obscure bluegrass duo one snowy night 46 years ago.

“I look forward to it every year to see what kind of uses it’s going to get,” Mr. Brooks said. “A lot of people say, ‘I don’t hear it much anymore.’ Well, it’s annoying to people. I wrote it to sing to drunks in a bar.”