Thanks to digital innovations, the Internet, tiny MP3 players and smartphones, we can choose to be awash in a sea of music, all day, every day. Indeed, if you came of age during the MP3 and YouTube revolution, you might find it hard to imagine not having nearly instantaneous access to every song ever recorded. But the concept of playing specific songs on demand all started with the jukebox. In the early to mid-1900s, jukeboxes were literally the life of the party, in speakeasies and diners throughout the United States. Everyone wanted music, but radio didn't really suit every situation; broadcasts didn't let an audience immediately pick and choose the tunes necessary for working dance parties into a feverish pitch. Live bands were always an option, of course. But booking a band took time and money that a lot of establishments didn't have. Instead of the glow of a tiny digital screen, people basked in the multi-colored glow of jukeboxes that measured in feet instead of centimeters.
They didn't click furiously through a series of hierarchical sub-menus on a tiny silvery box; they leaned with their forearms resting on ornate wood, glass and steel cabinets to peruse a jukeboxes list of songs. Like so many digital music toys today, the jukebox revolutionized music in terms of culture and technology. It's partly because of that revolution that so many people romanticize and yearn nostalgically for the days when a single music-playing machine could transform a drab, quiet tavern into a joyful (or sometimes mournful), magical place that filled ears and hearts with the power of music. Keep reading and you'll see how jukeboxes emerged from old-school technologies and capitalized on societal changes, becoming one of the most recognized symbols of the 1950's. These machines accepted grooved wax cylinders, in which the grooves represented recordings. As the cylinder rotated, a needle traced the grooves and vibrated to reproduce sounds on the cylinders. In short, they worked similarly to contemporary vinyl record players.
Phonographs were simple devices, but they helped introduce a new way of paying for music. It all started with the aptly named "nickel-in-the-slot" machines (later known as nickelodeon or automatic phonographs) built by Louis Glass in San Francisco. Curious customers stood around the machine, inserted a nickel and then listened to short (roughly two minute) songs. The machines were often hand-wound and used springs to move internal mechanisms, but battery-powered types were available as well. In this time before amplifiers, big speakers and electronic headphones, only stethoscope-like earphones made music audible. Once the song ended, you wiped off the earphones with towel and the next eager group of listeners took their seats. Others featured a small horn that played music just loud enough for a small, relatively quiet room. Recordings were limited and the cylinders were swapped manually, so songs changed only periodically. The technology might have been rather rudimentary, but the pay-for-play concept was revolutionary. Glass made more and more machines and to keep up with demand for this new type of music player.
As a result, they got more dependable, easier to make and the purchase price dropped to a point that even small bars could afford them. Those bars and cafes were often called juke joints, especially in the Southeastern United States, where the word juke had been a part of African-American lexicon for many years. Juking was slang for dancing - or ultimately just cutting loose - after a long, exhausting day of labor. Juke joints gained reputations as rowdy places with loud music and loud parties, thanks in part to the new music machines that fueled the fun, even when the band was too tired to play or too expensive to hire. In time, these machines become known as jukeboxes. But there were a few notable developments that happened before jukeboxes really hit the mainstream. On the next page you'll see how other technologies put really serious jive in the jukes.
But gramophone discs and amplifiers rocketed jukeboxes to rock star status. Gramophone discs had the same kinds of grooves as cylinders, but they came in flat disc form, making them less unwieldy and cheaper to manufacture. A format war of sorts (think cassettes versus CDs) ignited for a few years in the early 1900s but discs quickly won out, specifically 78 RPM (revolutions per minute) discs that became the go-to standard. Machines like Gabel's Automatic Entertainer even had a record changer so that customers could choose from multiple 24 recordings. Thanks to its totally automatic machine functionality, the Entertainer is considered the forerunner of all modern jukeboxes. Yet even fancy song selection capabilities couldn't propel the jukebox into true popularity, for a couple of reasons. One, coin-operated player pianos were exceedingly popular throughout the country, and people gathered en masse to watch these curiosities. The second problem was volume. Even with clunky earphones, phonographs produced tinny, soft sound that was often overwhelmed by ambient public noise, much less the chaos of beer-soaked patrons.
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