National Jukebox Day
I was in elementary school in the 1980s and early ‘90s which means I was a Book It kid. I’ve always loved to read and while I mostly credit my mom for that, no small part of that was thanks to Book It. I mean, reading meant acquiring the holy grail that was that Quadruple P (personal pepperoni pan pizza)! And you better believe I rolled up to the counter of the Pizza Hut in Podunk, Nowhere wearing my filled Book It pin with a big ol’ smile plastered across my tiny face.That Pizza Hut was one of my happy places. This was back when Pizza Hut had those awesome red tumblers, salad bars, stained glass lights hanging low over each table, an upright arcade cabinet (ours was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the longest time), and—my very favorite—a jukebox. Oh, the number of quarters I pilfered from my piggy bank to dump into the jukebox. I thought that machine was magical. For just 25¢ I could queue up some Guns ‘N Roses or New Kids on the Block and hear it anywhere I went inside the restaurant; moreover, I learned I had the power to make other people smile when I saw other patrons jamming along to one song or another.The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday is always on the fourth Thursday of November but, as J. Vigotsky put it, “the party really starts the night before.” Thanksgiving Eve, also known as “Blackout Wednesday” and “Drinksgiving,” is the busiest bar night of the year. And where there are bars, there are jukeboxes—which is why Thanksgiving Eve is also National Jukebox Day!
GIF: taken from the television show Happy Days; a scene in which the jukebox springs to life when The Fonz hits it
On November 23, 1889, Louis Glass and William S. Arnold debuted the prototypical jukebox: an Edison cylinder phonograph, retrofitted it with a coin mechanism. The music wasn’t amplified and listeners heard the music through listening tubes but the machine—which they called a “nickel-in-the-slot”—placed in the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco, raked in $1000 during its first six months in operation. As the nickel-in-the-slot metamorphized into the jukebox in that small-town Pizza Hut, record companies realized its potential and started making money hand over fist—at peak, 75% of US-produced vinyl records went into jukeboxes.“Jook” or “juke” was a slang word that had roots in the secret gatherings of enslaved Black for dance and celebration and evolved to mean, as Zora Neale Hurston stated, “a Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean the house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of all these.” The term “jukebox,” arose in the 1930and ‘40s, when “jook” entered white folks’ lexicon after the end of prohibition expanded to mean just about any dance hall and dine-and-dance establishment where on-demand pre-recorded music, and a variety of it, was necessary.
Photo: a Black woman wearing a black shirt and checkered pants leaning backward over a low, wide jukebox.
Though the classic jukeboxes began to decline in popularity in the late 1950s, they remained ubiquitous in bars, arcades, and restaurants catering to working- and middle-class folks. Those establishments went on to replace the jukeboxes that played vinyl records with ones that played CDs—the latter are the ones I grew up with and for which I still hold a deep nostalgia. Now, the things called “jukeboxes” are not so much machines playing physical records or CDs and more touch-screen, digitally networked music players or, even more recently, apps available for download on your phone. While there is still a certain magic to playing music through one of these more modern jukeboxes—and I’m sure my “geriatric millennial” is showing—they lack the je ne sais qoi of watching a machine switch out one CD to another between music selections.Regardless of the device that comes to mind when you think of jukeboxes, the social music experience they provide is worth celebrating. So, if you’re out and about this National Jukebox Day/Thanksgiving Eve, hit up some place with a jukebox and play a song or two. Or, if you’re camped out in the cozy confines of home, you can hop on Jukebox and share your music “across limitless people, devices and speakers, whether they're in the same room or halfway across the world.” And whether your jukebox revelry comes from playing music that make the whole joint bop along or from playing something that you know is going to drive everyone nuts (in extreme moderation, please), take the time to appreciate the social nature of music.In fact, allow me to celebrate the experience of sharing music with others right now—here’s a loose recreation of my favorite songs on the jukebox of my childhood, with music ranging from the 1970s to 1992:Happy National Jukebox Day!