The Story of the Great American Jukebox

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Long before Spotify and other online streaming platforms, Americans listen to music in a different way. To hear your favorite song, you plopped a nickel, later a dime, and eventually a quarter into a jukebox. Historically, the jukebox has brought people together during times of war and strife. Ed Liss, a former IT executive, is a jukebox collector and historian. He has long admired these music machines and spent a lifetime hunting and restoring the great American jukebox.

Here's the story. Well, I grew up in the northeast Bronx, New York. I lived in an apartment house and at the bottom of the apartment house are a group of stores, one of which was Rosie's Luncheonette. And in the luncheonette there was a Wurlitzer bubbling jukebox that when I was three years old I used to stand on a chair and watch the mechanism work and stand there sucking my thumb, moving from side to side as the music swayed the beat. And the 1015 was really the first jukebox that I ever saw and was with for many years. It was a beautiful machine. Judging by the serial number of my machine, it looks like it was made in late May of 1947, right before they switched to going to make a new model.

But growing up, the 1015 was the first to catch my eye as well as many other eyes. It was a very popular jukebox that came out right after World War II. And it was designed by the genius Paul M. Fuller, who worked with Wurlitzer from 1934, about 1949. And he designed all their jukeboxes. He's a brilliant designer. He used motion light, bubbles, cavitation, everything to attract you to the eye, to the jukebox.

And it was just beautiful. But the 1015 was unusual because it was designed using the golden ratio completely. The golden ratio, 1 to 1.618. It was made by a, in the 550 BC, by a Greek mathematician who figured out how to design ratios that would make anything you made visible to the eye appealing. Like the Parthenon, for example, is made with the golden ratio. Other great works of art, sculptures. But the 1015 is one big arc of light, color, animation, bubbles, and it has no protruding anything. It's just one big arc of beautiful color and design.

In its time, it was called the Wild Curve. But Paul Fuller was the master who designed all the Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the 40s using all these different components of light, animation, cavitation, etc. And of course, the great audio sound from the Wurlitzer jukebox itself.

The Wurlitzer company, as a company, goes back to the year 1659, when it was in Saxony before it became Germany. And their business was making musical instruments. They made violins, violas, cellos, all the instruments that the masters made in Europe.

And they used the finest materials, and they were instrument makers. In the 1850s, one of them, Farney Wurlitzer, came over to this country to see if the market here would be ripe for pianos that they would make. And they looked at the American pianos at the time and thought that they weren't as good quality as what Wurlitzer can do. So they opened an office in Cincinnati, Ohio, and started building pianos for the American market. But they're basically an instrument maker. Jukeboxes came much later because before jukeboxes, there was mechanical pianos, sometimes referred to as Nickelodeons.

You go into a merry-go-round and you see a Nickelodeon playing, and they sound beautiful. But Wurlitzer was a master at building electromechanical equipment. And in the USA, there were two places that were prone to bring skills for woodworking of that level. And it was in Brooklyn, Coney Island, and the other was in North Tonawanda, New York.

So the Wurlitzer factory made musical instruments, and then when jukeboxes came along in the early 30s, they made their first jukebox in 1934, and it was made in the North Tonawanda plant. And they had a half a mile long. The plant was half a mile long. It was humongous. But the engineering proudness that they had and the amount of work that they did in-house, the only thing that was important was speakers, coin equipment, and raw materials for lumber, wood cabinets.

That's it. Everything else was made in-house. So it was a self-producing factory and an incredible engineering feat. But the company was founded in 1659 in Saxony, before Wurlitzer and many. And you've been listening to Ed Liss, a jukebox collector and historian, and a guy who's been hunting and restoring jukeboxes, well, for most of his adult life, and had a love affair in the time he was three, sitting in front of them, watching them work, and listening to these amazing sounds coming out of the beautiful sounding speakers of the Wurlitzer jukeboxes of which the 1015 is a work of art.

Go to Google and search Wurlitzer 1015, and you will be impressed. When we come back, more of the story of the jukebox, here on Our American Story. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we do it all from the heart of the South in our small town of Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they are not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com.

Give a little, give a lot. That's OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories. We've been listening to Ed Liss map out the fascinating history of the jukebox. Ed has built a world-class museum of music in his home.

He owns 15,000 records, mostly 45s and 78s, that were of the highest quality in the heyday of jukeboxes, which introduced stereophonic sound. Let's now hear Ed describe what he calls a resurrection of a 1937 rock-holder rhythm king that was beyond restoration. During the 1850s and 60s, when there was still slavery, a lot of the slaves came from the country of Senegal. And they ended up in like cities like New Orleans and other southern places where they were dropped off and sold. But the language in Senegal was called the Gullah language, G-U-L-L-I-H. And basically there was a word in the Gullah language that meant to dance. And the word was jugue. Now it wasn't dancing like ballroom dancing. It was like wicked dancing around the fire with the crazed people dancing, usually what you'd see like voodoo or something.

So it was that kind of dancing, wicked dancing. So that became Anglo-Saxonized over the years, the jugue, into a jugue box, jukebox. Jukebox is a dance box, and it represents music that was brought in by mostly blacks and black slaves and gravitated towards that type of crazed music. White folks didn't like it and they frowned on it, but they loved black music.

They just wouldn't admit it. White folks loved black music, no question. I think when the American slavery ended and blacks were freed and all that, musicians were able to express themselves in a way that they could never do before. And a prime example of that would be Louis Armstrong, who really changed everything because Louis Armstrong played progressive music. In other words, he didn't read music note for note. His music was played from the heart.

So every time you play even the same tune, it would be different. And he brought a feeling of freedom that lasted and permeated throughout the early 20th century, like in Harlem, in a renaissance of music and jazz and poetry and all these other things coming together in New York City, for example. But Louis Armstrong was unique because he was the authentic person who loved and was outstanding musically.

And he was a great person as a human being, no question. But his music really changed everything because it made music more free. Black music certainly. Black music could not be played in places where white audiences were, like on a jukebox.

Wouldn't have it. Most people would go to a cotton club in New York to watch Duke Ellington, who was black, and they were all white. If you look in the audience, there were no black people in the audience. They were all white people. But there was a lot of discrimination going on at that time. And even popular people like Duke Ellington could not walk through the front door of the cotton club. He was still had to go through the back because he was black. So it didn't make a difference.

He was still what he was. So music in this case, the black musicians had a hard time getting their music heard. And the only way you can get them heard outside of a live band would be on a jukebox in a black juke joint that catered to black patrons. White people did not go to those places and listen to that music.

They just didn't. So discrimination was pretty big. And it took many years and decades for that to kind of like, subside a little bit, not entirely, but enough to make it more palatable.

I know Billie Holiday when Billie Holiday took a big band role in 1938. She worked in a big band for a year and she hated it because she was subject to all kinds of racism and humiliations. And it was horrible. And she swore she'd never do that again.

And she never did. But I always asked the question, why did musicians endure all these hardships, all these hardships and humiliations? Why did they do that? It's because they loved the music. It's about the music. They loved the music and they loved people that could play the music that they love to play.

So that's why they endure all these other negative issues. It's because it's about the music. It's always about the music. So Louis Armstrong, he was the one who really started the movement of freedom of expression in music, where other people came after him, but nobody could really top the beauty of Louis Armstrong.

He was the best of the best, absolutely the best. If you take a look at the music and the sound on a jukebox, you can hear the difference in the sound between an early 30s jukebox and a late 30s jukebox. And the reason is that the early 30s jukeboxes only had a dynamic range of about 5,000 cycles, which is not a lot. But unlike digital, which is zeros and ones, everything recorded on an analog jukebox was played back 100%. What happened was in the 1930s, there were advances made in microphone technology that increased the dynamic range from about 5,000 cycles or hertz to about 12,000 cycles or hertz. So one of the early 30s recordings, Bing Crosby, Camp Calloway, Billie Holiday, all these people were basically recording music that could only reach 5,000 cycles from a 78 RPM record.

So they were limited in what the playback could provide, but again, everything recorded was played back 100%. Camp Calloway is an interesting story. He became popular in the early 1930s. His first big hit was Minnie the Moocher. And Minnie the Moocher was a great tune, the Heidi Ho song they called it. But Minnie the Moocher was basically a true story of a homeless woman who lived in Minneapolis and her name was Minnie Gayton. And Minnie Gayton was homeless and she used to walk around the town in a shopping cart with her belongings.

And one day they found her frozen to death in the middle of two apartment buildings in the winter. But she inspired Minnie the Moocher. And if you listen to the song, the words of Minnie the Moocher, they talk about coke, cocaine, and opium, things of that nature.

I don't know how that is affiliated with Minnie the Moocher, but the song is about drugs. And you're listening to Ed List tell the story of the jukebox and through it, a little bit of American history, cultural history, musical history, and the story of race in America too. And how black musicians were treated, how black music was treated, white people as he said, white people as he said, pretending not to like the music that they actually liked.

And ultimately it would take decades before those barriers between black and white music would completely shatter well into the sixties. By the way, our Duke Ellington piece with Terry Teachout, the late Terry Teachout gets into this territory brilliantly. Go to our American stories and just write in Duke Ellington on the search bar, one of our finest hours, a walk through the 20th century in every dimension. When we come back, more of the story of the jukebox by an aficionado, Ed List, here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and with jukebox historian and collector Ed List of New York. He's brought back to life numerous jukeboxes over the years, preserving a meaningful part of America's music history.

Now let's return to Ed. Every project I've done and I've done total, well, I have 19 restored machines, but every project is different. And these machines are very complex, not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't do it as a weekend warrior.

You better know what you're doing when you get involved in these because they will confound you in less than five minutes. I have the last machine I restored. It was not that far from home, but it was incomplete, non-working. It was basically a pile of junk. And I don't know why I bought it, but I bought it and I must have stared at it for several months before I was able to figure out what to do with it. And we ended up spending two and a half years and over 2,000 hours of labor bringing this pile of junk back into a incredible piece of American music history.

Absolutely stunning. It needed everything. I found it in Katona, New York, which is not too far from where I live now. And the guy wanted to get rid of it because it was just taking up space. It had broken parts, missing pieces. I didn't know really what it was until I took it home and realized that what the hell did I do?

But my technician who works on my cabinets, who's a brilliant creator, said to me, I can restore this cabinet. And I looked at him like he was crazy because it had no wheels, had no side. The bottom side was missing. I mean, everything on it needed work, something. So we took it apart piece by piece and we had really nothing to go by. We had to make a brand new grill for the front, which is very elaborate. And we had a very fuzzy picture on the internet that kind of showed us what it looked like. And then we found a piece of wood in the cabinet that had been put there as a brace, which didn't belong there originally. And it was part of the original grill. And from that errant piece of wood, we were able to figure out what the grill looked like, what was made of, how it was shaped, molded, type of wood they used.

Really, it was like a clone. And after two and a half years and 2,000 hours of labor, we brought this jukebox back to life. It also had a first phonograph ever to use noise cancellation circuitry in the amplifier. That means that all 78s, regardless of the scratchy surface noise, the noise would be taken out.

And when I restored the amplifier, I had to research retired engineers and ask them, how did this company put in noise cancellation circuitry in 1937? And they told me they used notch filters. And what are notch filters? Notch filters are capacitors that basically eliminate noise in certain frequency ranges. So if 78s couldn't go beyond 5,000 hertz of cycles on the sound spectrum, most of the noise would be in the mid range. And that's what these did.

They targeted mid range noise and removed it completely. I had to find a guy who was long retired who knew how to do this in his amplifier. And I hired him, John Wiesner, the best amp restorer on the planet. And he knew how to do it. And he did it. So I took this machine from an incomplete non-working pile of junk into a beautiful sounding, looking, looking jukebox.

I'm very proud of it. And all the records in there, there are only 12 records, 12 78s. Each one is matched to the era. I have Judy Garland, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Clambake 7.

You name it, and I got it. But it's only 12 selections. The fidelity on it is so good that I get chills every time I hear it. It's a 1937 Racola. The model is the Rhythm King. And it was made in 1937. In 1937, this jukebox cost $500, which was during the Depression, which was a fortune of money at that time.

$500 in 1937 was a lot of money. And we had to, it was tarnished, someone had varnished it with this brown varnish on the cabinet. And we knew that it didn't come out of the factory that way. So we stripped it very carefully. And under it was beautifully bookmatched walnut. The components of it and materials they used was unbelievable.

And we worked with hand tools from the 1890s to ensure accuracy and perfection, so that we were finished with this project. This machine was absolutely perfect. You can go online anytime on YouTube and watch the resurrection of the 1937 Racola Rhythm King.

It's 17 minutes long. And it's a glory to watch. And you can see what the machine looked like when I got it to what it ended up and sounded like when I was all done with it. When we finished restoring the machine, we decided to make a documentary of the entire restoration or resurrection process. I call it a resurrection because this machine was beyond restoration. It was a pile of junk, and it needed to be resurrected.

And we resurrected it. And in the middle of November of 2016, it played for the first time in 80 years, eight decades. And when we heard the music and heard the quality of the fidelity, we were absolutely floored. We were like frozen on our tracks to hear this machine singing again after eight decades of silence. And what we heard was beautiful, beautiful sound, beautiful bass response, smooth bottom, crystal clear notes, and it was a very special speaker called the Jensen Series X. It was a new type of speaker that Jensen made. And it was the first time they used it in this jukebox, any jukebox. But I had it reconed. It was difficult because it wasn't like usual speakers.

It had a few quirks to it. But we got it done. And we got the whole thing done. And the machine is restored now back to brand new tradition in every way, shape, and form. People who are listening to Ed List talk about the restoration of a grand, grand jukebox. And he talks about it with this love, with this adoration that Americans are familiar with, any of you who have a desire and a love for restoring things, be it cars. In my family, my mom had a deep affection for restoring wood and furniture back to its original form. And it was a time consuming and painstaking process to do it. And when he starts to talk about that, or recall a Rhythm King jukebox, he called it a piece of junk that he returned to its original magnificence. It wasn't a restoration.

He said it was a resurrection. Ed List's story continues here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and with jukebox historian and collector, Ed List, who is masterfully taking us through the history of the jukebox and the role they played in culture and the jukebox formed teenage social life and determined the most popular teen hangout spots around.

Let's return to Ed with the rest of this story. Jukeboxes really became popular when prohibition was repealed in 1933, which allowed social gathering, drinking. So jukeboxes became popular because it was a cheap form of entertainment rather than hiring a live band, which costs money. The early jukeboxes were really glorified radio cabinets with phonographs in them, mechanisms in them.

If you take a look at the early wooden ones, they all look like art deco or they have different unusual wood markings on them. They were made mostly from walnut, birch, and woods that basically were good for absorbing sound. Keep in mind that in the early years of jukeboxes, they didn't have what's called sound shaping. Sound shaping is basically the ability to shape sound in a cabinet because you didn't have like equalizers where you can do it by frequencies. So a cabinet had to be made out of walnut or some kind of a wood that would be positive towards music like a violin. When you make a good violin or cello, you got to use the best varnishes, the best woods, the veneers and all that. The same with a wooden jukebox.

You got to use the best products that will make the sound as good as possible without sound shaping. So the early machines used basically radio cabinets that had phonographs in them. And then in the 1930s, they invented what's called phenolic plastic, which were plastic pieces that had the ability to shine light through them. So now the jukeboxes became more attractive because they could be lit up. And then you put in rotating cylinders so that the colors could change and bubble tubes so that the bubbles would circulate.

It was called cavitation in science. But the jukeboxes at the time were precisely tuned to the age, the way they sounded, the way they worked, the way they looked, and certainly the way they made you feel. Jukebox has a connection that only a jukebox can make. Nothing plays like a jukebox.

Nothing. Except maybe a live orchestra or band. But jukeboxes had a certain sound. And even a jukebox from the 30s or 40s or 50s will sound different because the technology they used, the records they used, everything they did at that time was different and precisely tuned to the age of that machine. When I find the machine, it's usually dead, incomplete, non-working, abandoned or whatever. You have to have vision and grit to pull these back together because they're very complicated pieces of equipment.

But as I said earlier, they're precisely engineered. One machine I restored, I found in a garage in Bedford, New York in 1988 and had been used in White Plains, New York in a restaurant whose operator, who owned the jukebox, was right next to my father's business for 42 years in White Plains. And I never knew the jukebox was even there. So when I found that jukebox, I restored it all with the original equipment in it, and it's in my collection, and it plays all the big band hits of the 1940s. I have another machine called the Bomber Nose, which was built in 1948, which looks like the tail gunner on an F24 bomber, the tail gunning canopy. And it plays 24 45s. Originally it was a 78 machine. It was converted to 45s in the early 50s. And when I found it, it had been already converted to 45s, but it was a mess and it needed everything. So that machine now is called Grade 1, which means it's the highest quality restoration. After all these years, I restored it. All the machines I have basically tell an interesting story.

They all sound great, but you got to keep in mind that when I get these things, they're not working. They're incomplete. I got to research them. I got to find the parts. I got to find the skilled people that know how to fix them or fix them or restore them.

Not easy. But my interest is not just restoring the hardware. It's in restoring the authentic experience of listening to what it sounded like at that time, the artist, the music, the machinery. It's all about the jukebox experience. And I've restored that experience so that you can see history in front of your eyes.

And that's what's so thrilling about it. It's history being restored authentically 100%. So when I restore a jukebox, it's got to be done right. I don't cut corners. I do a lot of research first, but then when I finish the project, I just can't believe what I've done because it's so much work.

But I've got 19 restored machines and they all work perfectly. So I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish. And again, it's authenticating the experience and restoring it the way it was at that time. In the mid 1950s, I lived in the Northeast Bronx and there was a bar on the corner of one of the streets. And in that bar was a jukebox, of course. So one day, a jukebox salesman walks in with a new model, a new model jukebox. He wheels it in, he pulls the one out of the wall, the plug out of the wall and puts the plug in to this new one. And he says to the bartender, he says, hey, I'd like to demonstrate this for you.

Try this out for a couple of days. The bartender said, you can't do that. This belongs to blah, blah, blah people. And it's their machinery. So he says, ah, it's okay.

Just leave it for a couple of days. So the bartender makes a phone call. Ten minutes later, two big goons walk in, big goons walk in and they ask, where's the jukebox salesman?

And there he is sitting on a stool. So they go over to the wall. They pull the plug out of the jukebox. They roll it out the door, into the street, into the gutter, into the sidewalk where it smashes into 10,000 pieces. Then they go back inside and this poor guy is sitting there at the bar, still trembling. They take one arm, one leg, a practice swing on each side and toss them out the door. Demonstration over. So I know one V-200 never made it.

It got disintegrated at that incident. So you never do that in the industry. It's called romancing.

You don't want to romance people because that'll get you killed or get you injured or something. But that location belonged to these people and any permission you wanted to do anything, you got to go through them or else you're going to get your butt tossed out the door, which is exactly what happened. So that was an interesting story. There are other stories like it. I have a friend who used to work for an operator and one day he gets a call in a horrible area in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of them in the morning, and he's behind a jukebox trying to fix it. And all of a sudden the fight breaks out and beer bottles and fists and chairs and tables are flying all over the place. So he's standing behind the jukebox, he puts two wires together, puts the cover on and crawls on his hands and knees out the door and the place was in a melee. So stories like that. Jukebox operators had to serve as machines at all hours of the day because once the music stops, the income stops. So you got to be around to fix it. But in this case, it wasn't a great situation.

Lots of stories like that. You have fights where you end up somebody's head goes through the jukebox or something like that. Jukebox never got any respect. But interestingly enough, they're one of the greatest products this country ever made, the great American jukebox. And a terrific job on our production team.

And that consists of Russ Jones, Micah Touchet, and Andrew Stein. And a special thanks to Ed Liss. He's a former IT executive, jukebox collector and historian who's long admired the machines and spent a lifetime hunting and restoring great American jukeboxes. Indeed, he's a great American jukebox indeed, what Ed is doing is restoring history. The story of the jukebox and Ed Liss's story too. And for restorers everywhere who restore anything. Them too, here on Our American Story.