At one time, no music bar or disco could do without it. For generations of visitors, the jukebox was a symbol and a pleasant companion – for every coin thrown in, it repaid with a favorite song. Although its fame has given way today to more modern technologies, it is still not difficult to come across this music box. The first jukebox was installed 135 years ago, on November 23, 1889, in San Francisco, USA.
In that time, it has come a long way to today’s digital versions with dozens of genres and hundreds of thousands of songs. And he also became the main promoter of rock and roll in the 1950s in America. And that’s because teenagers could socialize around him without parental supervision. Without him, the young post-war generation would never have easily gotten into the wild new genre that radio stations were still reluctant to play, but Chuck Berry or Bill Haley hits were available on every corner for a nickel.
American entrepreneur Louis Glass is considered the “father” of the jukebox. This head of the San Francisco branch of the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison’s Pacific Phonograph Co. in fact, he thought of placing Edison’s phonograph, the first sound recording device, in an oak box. After throwing in a nickel, two minutes of music flowed from it. Together with William Arnold, they installed the first jukebox in the Palais Royal Saloon bar in San Francisco. The success of the music box was immediate.
The problem with the first jukeboxes was that they could only play one song. The bar owners did occasionally change the rollers in the phonographs, but it still wasn’t the same. The change and the golden age of jukeboxes only came with the advent of the gramophone and gramophone records. The round record definitively replaced the phonograph roller in the early 1920s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the most popular genres in the US were rhythm & blues, along with country music. But according to the owners of the radio stations at the time, they were incompatible “with educated society”. And when radios weren’t playing, jukeboxes were playing. And as these genres alternated in bars, they gave rise to the musical foundations of rock and roll, which is also most associated with the jukebox. Bill Haley or Elvis Presley sang their hits here from shiny chrome cabinets, reflecting the taste of the time. After the United States, there were about three-quarters of a million in their heyday in the mid-1950s.
But then came further social and technological developments, portable radios and long-playing records, and the jukebox’s fame slowly began to decline. It wasn’t until the advent of “CDs” that their number in the US in the 1980s returned to a solid quarter of a million. Now you can see both classic jukeboxes, using records or CDs, and more modern versions, using the MP3 format and the Internet.
The term jukebox began to be used sometime in the 1940s, and there is speculation about the origin of the word. It is most often said that the word jukebox came from the slang term juke-joint (a joint), used mainly by blacks in the South and Southeast of the United States. The word juke (jook) comes from the creole language gullah, whose word joog means noisy, passionate or disorderly.
Even today, jukeboxes are not missing in many nonstops and bars, but their main place is in cultural memory. “They have a magic about them that reminds us how important it is to share the love of music,” wrote Artistic Echoes.
This jukebox became a medium of nostalgia, as Chris Pearce put it in the book Jukebox Art: “It was the jukebox that a lonely trucker in a coffee shop threw a nickel into to remember his child back home. The jukebox that the kids in the Chuck song went to Berry’s when they wanted to hear something really hot. A jukebox that brought communities together and a local operator supplied it with old-time songs and dances.”
Source: www.tyden.cz
