On this day (April 29) in 1991, Alan Jackson released “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” as the lead single from his 1991 album of the same name. The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, bringing the Georgia native his second chart-topper.
Videos by American Songwriter
Jackson hit the ground running with his debut album Here in the Real World. His debut single, “Blue Blooded Woman” (1989), was the only single from his debut that missed the top 40. The next three singles were top 5 hits. Then, he found his first No. 1 with the album’s final single, “I’d Love You All Over Again.” He carried that momentum with the lead single and title track from his next album, Don’t Rock the Jukebox.
[RELATED: On This Day in 2000, Alan Jackson Released a Nod to a Country Legend That Went to No. 1]
Jackson would go on to dominate the country chart in the 1990s. The decade saw him release 33 singles. One of those singles, ” A House with No Curtains” (1998), missed the top 10. Sixteen of those singles went to No. 1. He would continue to have consistent chart success throughout the 2000s.
How a Broken Jukebox Inspired Jackson’s Second No. 1 Hit
Alan Jackson wrote “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” with Roger Murrah and Keith Stegall. However, before he sat down to write the song, he found the inspiration for it in a conversation with his bass plauyer abotu a broken jukebox. He explained the origin of the song at the beginning of the music video.
“I wanna tell you a little story about an incident that happened on the road a couple years ago when me and my band, The Strayhorns, were playing this little truck stop lounge in Doswell, Virginia,” Jackson begins. “We’d been there for four or five nights, playing those dance cets. It’d been a long night, and I took a break and walked over to the jukebox. Roger, my bass player, was already over there reading the records,” he recalled. “I leaned up on the corner of it, and one of the legs was broken off, the jukebox just kind of wobbling around,” Jackson added. “Roger just looked up at me and said,” his sentence cuts off as the opening line of the song, “Don’t rock the jukebox” plays.
Featured Image by Amiee Stubbs/imageSPACE/Shutterstock
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