2 December 2024
A jukebox is a coin-operated machine that plays selected musical recordings. The box part of the word is understood easily enough, but where does juke come from? Juke is actually two distinct words in English. The one that forms jukebox is recorded from the first half of the twentieth century in Black slang.
That juke is from the Gullah juke or joog, meaning disorderly or wicked. Gullah is an African-American community from coastal South Carolina and Georgia and a creole language spoken by them. The Gullah juke is probably from the Wolof dzug, meaning to live wickedly. Wolof is a language of the Senegambia region of West Africa.
The original sense of juke in Black slang is that of a roadhouse or dance hall, in full the term is jook house. It’s first recorded in the Black newspaper the Kansas City Call on 25 July 1930:
Bear Creek camp has no jook house—dance hall and gambling dive—but the crowd always finds a floo[r] where it can dance to the tunes made by Henry Robinson’s fiddle and Sam Markham’s banjo.
But juke could also be a verb meaning to dance. That sense is found in the title of a 1933 piano solo piece, Jookit, by Walter Roland.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote about juke in two of her essays. In her 1934 Characteristics of Negro Expression she had this to say:
Jook is the word for a Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean a house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of these.
[…]
Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as blues, and on blues has been founded jazz. The singing and playing in the true Negro style is called “jooking.”
And the following year she wrote in Mules and Men:
The little drama of religion over, the “job” reverted to the business of amusing itself. Everybody making it to the jook hurriedly or slowly as the spirit moved.
[…]
The jook was in full play when we walked in. The piano was throbbing like a stringed drum and the couples slow-dragging about the floor were urging the player on to new lows. “Jook, Johnnie, Ah know you kin spank dat old peanner.” “Jook it Johnnie!”1 “Throw it in de alley!”2
The notes read:
1Play the piano in the manner of the jook or “blues.”
2Get low down.
Another early use in print is in another Black newspaper, Topeka, Kansas’s Capitol Plaindealer of 21 February 1937 in an article about how white musicians would often attend juke sessions of Black musicians but in many locations could not play with them:
The “white brethren” would been glad to have sat in on the “juke session” to have lent a hand in the “torment” at the slightest urge. The “slightest urge” is not quite permissible down here in Gawgaw as yet, but I’ve seen it happen in places that boasted just as much prejudice and taboo…..Funny thing, but “swing sessions” are piercing the south and and [sic] that means more toleration in the arts
[…]
All of which says (this is not a “for social equality adventure) that the stage and show biz is putting a “new realization” into the American social and economic scheme and that good “juke” (plain playing for pleasure to see how much will come out of the instrument) sessions attract everybody, blue, brown, red, white or black and they forget the echoing “don’t”.
Finally, we get jukebox by 15 April 1939, when it appears in Sunflower Petals, the student newspaper of the Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead, Mississippi. The school was a white school:
We may soon have an automat instead of a store—if the present trend toward nickel-in-the-slot machines continues. For some months we’ve had the familiar “jook-box,” and now we can get cokes from the huge metal clerk on the Canteen porch.
That’s the juke in jukebox. The other one, usually spelled jouk or jook, is much older. It means to duck or to bend so as to evade, and it appears in Scots in the early sixteenth century. It’s origin is unknown, first recorded in a Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:
Syne hynt Eneas, ane Perrellus lance in hand
And it addressis fer furth, on the land
To ane magus that subtell, was and sle
And Iowkit in, vnder the spere as he
The schaft schakand flew furth, about his hede
(Thereupon Aeneas grasped a perilous lance in his hand and aimed it far forth across the ground to slay Magus, who was skillful and juked in and under the spear as the shaft quivering flew forth over his head.)
Despite both words having the same pronunciation and a semantic association with movement, they are not etymologically related.
Sources:
Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 25 July 1930, 7B/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. [The scan of this page is bad. A clearer example of this same article can be found at Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 26 July 1930, 5/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.]
“Canteen Gets a Coke Vendor.” Sunflower Petals (Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School, Moorhead, Mississippi), 15 April 1939, 4/2. Archive.org.
Fowkles, William. “Seeing and Saying.” Capitol Plaindealer (Topeka, Kansas), 21 February 1937, 6/5–6. Readex: African American Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v.1, juke, v.3.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Characteristics of Negro Expression (1934). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 841. Archive.org.
———. Mules and Men (1935). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 140. Archive.org.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. jukebox, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v., jouk | jook, v.2.
Virgil. The XIII Bukes of Eneados, Gavin Douglas, trans. (1513). London: William Copeland, 1553, 10.9, 269. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Photo credit: Daderot, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.