Overview
"Don't Rock the Jukebox" is a song by American country music artist Alan Jackson. It was released on April 29, 1991 as the lead single from the album of the same name, Don't Rock the Jukebox. It was his second consecutive Number One single on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks charts. Jackson wrote the song with Roger Murrah and Keith Stegall.
The song also received an ASCAP award for Country Song of the Year in 1992. That same year, the song was covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks, featuring commentary by Alan Jackson himself, for their 1992 album Chipmunks in Low Places.
Background and writing
The song is sung from the perspective of a heartbroken bar patron who wishes to hear country music to ease his heartbreak. As such, he tells the other patrons in the bar, "don't rock the jukebox" (i.e. play country instead of rock).
Jackson wrote about the inspiration at the beginning of the 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 up in Doswell, Virginia, a place called Geraldine's. We'd been there for four or five nights, you know, playing those dance sets. It'd been a long night, I took a break and walked over to the Jukebox. Roger, my bass player, was already over there reading the records, you know. I leaned up on the corner of it and one of the legs was broken off, jukebox kind of wobbling around, you know. And Roger looked up at me and said...".
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).