Elwood Edwards, a media multihyphenate who voiced AOL’s iconic greeting “You’ve got mail,” has died.
Edwards died Tuesday at age 74 in New Bern, N.C., after a long illness, his former employer, Ohio NBC affiliate WKYC, confirmed. According to the television station, he died the day before his 75th birthday.
During his decade-long stint at WKYC, Edwards worked as a “graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades,” the station said, “yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame.”
That year, Edwards recorded the four short phrases — including “You’ve got mail” — that he had “a certain amount of trouble trying to escape” for the rest of his life, he joked in 2012.
Thirty years ago, Edwards’ wife, Karen, was working as a customer service representative at Quantum Computer Services, AOL’s predecessor company, when she overheard then-chief executive Steve Case say he needed a voiceover actor for a new project.
“I had an idea. Why not make the service more personal by adding the voice of a person?” Case wrote in his 2016 book “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.” Karen Edwards promptly volunteered her husband’s services.
“I’d never met him, and didn’t know what his voice sounded like. But I figured it would at least be a good prototype, a sample we could play for other voiceover actors when we started auditions,” Case said.
The executive scribbled a few phrases — “Welcome,” “You’ve got mail,” “Files done” and “Goodbye” — onto a Post-it note and handed them to Karen, who promised recordings by the next day.
Edwards’ voice “couldn’t have been more perfect,” Case recalled in his book. “It was disarmingly friendly, like the voice you’d expect from a stranger who offered to carry your grandmother’s groceries. The second I heard it, I knew we weren’t going to be auditioning anyone else.”
Within a month, AOL was mailing CDs to millions of people nationwide, each containing upgraded software and a message from Elwood Edwards — who was paid a mere $200 for the homemade recordings.
“I didn’t really think anything of it at the time,” Edwards said in a 2019 episode of the “Twenty Thousand Hertz” podcast. He had worked in broadcasting since high school, so hearing his name come out of a speaker was “nothing new.”
“I don’t think anyone had any idea what it would become,” he said.
Edwards went on to lend his voice to other projects, including promotions for the 1998 romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” and a 2000 episode of “The Simpsons.” In 2015, he appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” and after he recited his signature phrase, Fallon told the audience, “That’s worth the price of admission, right there. That’s enough.”
The former broadcaster never received any residuals for his AOL voice work, he told Inside Edition in 2016, two years after his retirement from WKYC. He wasn’t able to find much voiceover work after the gig either, he told Culture Honey later that year, because he was “pigeonholed as the ‘You’ve got’ guy, and nothing ever really came of that.”
Still, he said on “Twenty Thousand Hertz,” being the voice of AOL was immensely gratifying, as was being recognized for it over the years.
“Our world is full of people who were in the right place at the right time, and I’m glad to be one of those,” he said.
Elwood Hughes Edwards Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Glen Burnie, Md., and began his broadcasting career in high school in North Carolina.
“He started out as a teenager, before he was old enough to collect a paycheck,” his daughter Sallie Edwards told the New York Times on Thursday. He went on to work behind the scenes in television, sometimes going on camera to report the weather. Later, he voiced commercials for businesses and other organizations, including a local church.
In addition to his daughter Sallie, Edwards is survived by another daughter, Heather Edwards; a brother, Bill; and a granddaughter, the outlet reported.
