A jukebox is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine, that can play specially selected songs from self-contained media. The traditional jukebox is rather large with a rounded top and has colored lighting on the front of the machine on its vertical sides. The classic jukebox has buttons with letters and numbers on them that, when combined, are used to indicate a specific song from a particular CD or record.

During the 1890s, recordings had become popular primarily through coin-in-the-slot phonographs in public places.

In the decade 1910-20, the phonograph became a truly mass medium for popular music, and recordings of large-scale orchestral works and other classical instrumental music proliferated.

In the mid-1920s, radio, which provided free music, developed, and this new factor, plus the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, threw the phonograph industry into serious decline.

During the 1930s, as the American companies relied mainly on dance records in jukeboxes to satisfy a dwindled market, Europe supplied a slow but steady trickle of classical recordings.

Aside from the Chitlin Circuit (Black patrons and musicians), the jukebox was the only place to hear this type of music, from the late 1920's until the late 1950's. In it's heyday, the juke box provided the power to sell hundreds of records at once for artists like Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

The jukebox was color blind in a segregated world. Black patrons thought Bill Black, Carl Perkins, and Steve Cropper were Negroes singing, while White patrons, were exposed to, and accepted Black artists work, never having seen the performer in person.

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After the depression, jukebox sales rose dramatically, as leading manufacturers Wurlitzer, Seeburg, and Rock-Ola, devised spectacular creations of wood, metal, and phenolic resins which danced behind tubes of enchanting cellophane, Polaroid film, and plastic.

Interestingly enough the Rock-Ola name had nothing to do with Rock n' Roll. Like Seeburg, and Wurlitzer, it was the last name of the companies founder, Canadian David Rockola.

During World War II from 1942 till early 1946, jukebox production was halted by the US government to conserve labor and materials for war efforts. Wurlitzer's 1946 model 1015 was the most popular of the era with more than 56,000 units shipped under the slogan "Wurlitzer Is Jukebox."