Why Are They Called the “Grammys”?

It’s not an accident that the Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys all have names typically used for people (though they’re not all named after specific people). But it is an accident that the Grammys sound like they were christened to honor someone’s grandmother.

In 1957, America’s music industry formed the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS, now just known as the Recording Academy) as an answer to similar organizations in film and television. “We feel it’s about time the record industry grows up and gets a little recognition for its part in the entertainment industry,” Columbia Records executive Paul Weston, the newly minted president of NARAS’s Hollywood chapter, told the press at the time.

The group’s main function was to celebrate recent musical achievements with a big awards ceremony—they just had to decide what to call those awards. One possibility was “the Eddies” as a nod to Thomas Edison, a pivotal figure in the early history of recorded music. Emile Berliner had built off Edison’s phonograph to invent the gramophone. (You can see how the device worked in the video below.)

NARAS landed on gramophones as the design for the statuettes themselves. But by the spring of 1959, with the first ceremony just weeks away, they still hadn’t chosen a name. So they crowdsourced ideas from the public. “Weston offers 25 albums for anyone who sends the best suggestion to the Recording Academy at 9157 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood,” the Associated Press’s Bob Thomas wrote in early April of that year. “How about disky?”

Needless to say, disky and Eddie were both rejected in favor of Grammy, which multiple people submitted. Since Rosejay Elizabeth “Jay” Danna had mailed her letter first, she nabbed the grand prize. Danna, a thirtysomething New Orleans resident, was inspired by her memories of growing up with a gramophone in the living room.

“I used to play that little machine all the time,” she told the Associated Press in 1983. “And sometimes it got loud and my mother would yell, ‘Turn down the Grammy.’” After learning she won, Danna asked the academy for something beyond the 25 promised LPs: a Grammy of her own. But they told her that “it was against the rules, that only winners were permitted to own Grammys,” she recalled.

The first Grammy Awards ceremony was a black-tie banquet held in Los Angeles (with a concurrent event for NARAS members in New York City) on May 4, 1959. Winners ran the gamut from Ella Fitzgerald and Henry Mancini to Alvin and the Chipmunks—or, more accurately, Ross Bagdasarian, who created and voiced the creatures. The band, then going by “David Seville and the Chipmunks,” took home three golden gramophones for “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).”

Learn More About the Grammy Awards: