Jack Cohen, the Jukebox, and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll
"In 1934, my grandpa Jack told his new bride Gertrude that he was betting their life savings on a newfangled contraption called the coin-operated phonograph. The Jewish 'Coin Men' would make history."
By Carl Kurlander
Special to Jewdicious
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jewdicious frequently references eras and places where Jews were shut out of professions and had to innovate (scramble). Today we are pleased to present Carl Kurlander’s story of how his own family helped change American culture nearly a century ago.
If someone asked you why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sits on the shores of Lake Erie, your first guess probably would not be a group of corned-beef-loving Jewish businessmen in Cleveland who promoted a new sound that broke the barriers of segregation and revolutionized the music industry. I myself had no idea about this story when I was on the set of the first movie I wrote, St. Elmo’s Fire, watching Demi Moore dancing atop a jukebox as Rob Lowe’s character wailed on his saxophone. It’s only in making my latest film, Jack and the Jukebox, that I have learned how my Grandpa Jack and his fellow coin operators changed the way we listened to music — and the music we listened to.
My grandfather’s real name was Jack Povelski. He was born in 1904 in New York City to Jewish immigrants Sam and Yetta, who, like millions of Jews, had fled persecution in Eastern Europe. Sam got a job in the garment district, but after he crossed a picket line and his life was threatened, he moved the family to Cleveland and changed their name to Cohen. When Jack was a teenager, his father died in a car accident, and Jack dropped out of school to support his mother, three brothers, and sister.
Like other minorities, including Italians and African Americans, ambitious Jews faced prejudice entering traditional professions and took advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities. In 1934, Jack told his new bride Gertrude that he was betting their life savings on a newfangled contraption called an automatic coin-operated phonograph. Depending on who’s telling the story, my grandmother was either completely supportive or threatened to divorce him. But my mother always said her father could see the future, and what Jack realized was that while no one had money for luxuries like a phonograph, everyone could spend a nickel to hear their favorite song.
The jukebox had become popular during Prohibition, placed in speakeasies, which in Ohio were often controlled by the Mayfield Road Gang — an alliance of Italians and Jewish businessmen, the latter of which had made fortunes smuggling booze across Lake Erie in speedboats. The ‘Jewish Navy,’ as they were known, got their liquor from a bootlegger named Joe Kennedy, whose son Jack would become president — and whose son Robert would go after the jukebox industry for its mob connections during the Senate Racketeering Hearings. Today, RFK’s son is in the cabinet, and the jukebox industry he investigated is a bygone chapter of American history. Yet it’s well worth revisiting, as these machines and their ‘coin men’ helped define in many ways who we are today.
The very word “jukebox” was controversial to some as it connotated juke joints in the South where folks went to drink and dance to that wild jazz music some believed would make young people want to have sex. While mob-tied operators in Chicago and New York had bloody territorial wars over jukeboxes, in Cleveland, operators agreed to cooperate.
To promote a positive image of the industry, in 1939, Jack started the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association. In 1941, Jack invented the “Hit Tune of the Month,” where one song was put in the front of 3,000 jukeboxes and advertised on streetcars, buses, and on the back of an elephant when the circus was in town. Billboard credited Jack and this program with breaking songs not just locally but nationally. My grandfather also discovered new talents, including a young Frank Sinatra singing with Tommy Dorsey’s band — my mother swore Frank used to sing her and my Aunt Barbara to sleep when he visited the house. My Aunt Barbara told me how she was left as a baby with an aunt so her parents could go to L.A. with Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. Sure enough, we found a Billboard article from that year reporting that coin man Jack Cohen was visiting the set of Tommy Dorsey’s movie where Mickey Rooney was playing the drums and writing a song for Tommy’s new vocalist Frank Sinatra. When Frank opened at the Cleveland Coliseum in 1974, he stopped the show to thank one man for helping him get his start: Jack Cohen.
Jack also found an unknown singer at a lounge by the airport and booked him to play the Jewish Beechmont Country Club. There was pushback because the artist was Black, but when Harry Belafonte took the stage, his shirt unbuttoned, the women went wild and wouldn’t let him leave.
Belafonte wouldn’t be the only artist of color Jack championed. He stocked his jukeboxes with the records of Black artists that radio stations refused to play. A 1942 photograph shows Jack bringing Duke Ellington to Cleveland alongside his fellow operator Leo Dixon, an African American who served as an officer in the Phonograph Merchant Association. What made the jukebox inherently democratic was that those who dropped the coins determined what was played. Years before the civil rights movement, these coin men crossed racial lines, placing machines in neighborhoods across the city and letting the music do what politics had not.
After the war, Jack began throwing “Hit Tune Parties” for a new group of young people called ‘teenagers’ — who, for the first time, had the freedom to press buttons and choose music different from what their parents listened to. Jack’s used jukebox records ended up at two stores on Prospect Avenue. One was Record Mart, run by his brothers Ben and Harry Cohen, who shared Jack’s legendary love of food. Both over 300 pounds, they used their hefty size to advertise themselves as “The Biggest Dealers in Town.”
The other store, Record Rendezvous, was run by Jack’s friend Leo Mintz, who noticed Black and white teenagers coming in asking for “rockin’” records — music the industry still called “race music.” To move this inventory, Leo sponsored a down-on-his-luck deejay named Alan Freed. Freed’s Moondog “Rock and Roll” House Party popularized the term across the country. Taking a page from the Hit Tune Parties Jack had been throwing for years, Freed hosted the Moondog Coronation Ball, where so many teenagers showed up that the police shut down what would be remembered as the world’s first rock concert. Freed had to apologize, but a musical revolution had just begun.
As a teenager in Cleveland, I loved going on routes with my cool Uncle Louis, who had married my Aunt Barbara and taken over the business with my Grandma Gert after Jack died. A few years ago, I started visiting my still cool Louis in his senior living facility, where he was still dealing poker twice a week and playing jazz piano. As a teenager himself, Louis had been a Jewish kid from the wrong side of the tracks who sneaked into Cleveland’s Black and Tan clubs to hear that new sound. He started telling me stories I had never heard — about the coin routes, the cash business, the connections between Cleveland, Vegas, and the mobsters Jack knew. These were characters as great as any in a Hollywood movie, and I realized that if I didn’t capture them, they would disappear. We started filming what would become “Jack and the Jukebox,” which has recently also morphed into a Jukebox Stories Substack and podcast.
At Lake View Cemetery on Mayfield Road, Alan Freed is buried beneath a tombstone that was designed at the suggestion of the legendary musician and Sopranos star, Stevie Van Zandt, in the shape of a jukebox. Its inscription honors the music that “broke down the barriers of segregation and provided a joyful soundtrack for hope and change.” Not far away is another grave — my grandfather Jack Cohen’s. Through making this documentary, I’ve come to understand that the revolution didn’t start with a song. It started with a nickel and a group of Jewish coin men who had the vision to play the music nobody else would.
CARL KURLANDER is an award-winning screenwriter and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His documentary, Jack and the Jukebox, is in production with plans to premiere next year.
Is there captioning for the film preview? I presume that the film will be captioned?
https://jackandthejukebox.com/
Great story and another example of Jewish vision to circumnavigate the choppy waters of discrimination against keeoping Jews out of professions. A nickle in the 30s was an affordable risk. A movie ticket from Hollywood studios also was. It takes poverty to make some hungry enough to think creatively.