Created by Ed Liss
On Tuesday, May 8 at 6:30 p.m. the Desmond-Fish Library will present The Great American Jukebox, a 45-minute video by Andrew Stein Videography. This is an unusual video, which jukebox aficionados will find very interesting. The video combines American history with the jukebox.
The Great American Jukebox is the creation of Ed Liss, a resident of Somers, a jukebox collector for four decades, who has worked with computer information systems for more than 35 years. He says that the video’s focus is on what the jukeboxes represent. “It’s not about me as much as it is about the history of music and preserving its natural form,” he was quoted as saying prior to a presentation in the past.
The film moves from the years of slavery through the 1960s, with each era of music having a jukebox as its time-traveling companion. Per Liss, creating the video was “an opportunity to sit down and have a teachable moment, putting together the history of American music by letting the jukebox do the talking. The jukebox is a creature of its own time because of the way it looks, the way it sounds, and the way it moves. It’s the ultimate time machine,” Liss says.
