Agathos Dorea

“Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

~Chuck Berry, Guitarist and Cultural Icon

Reaching #33 on The Top 40 Charts on this day in April 1957, Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven signaled a changing of the guard. In a blistering two-minute and twenty-five second anthem that sent parents racing to cover their children’s ears, Berry single-handedly captured the restless spirit of teens from coast-to-coast.

Within days of its release, Roll Over Beethoven had swept the nation. Ultimately reaching number #2 on the R&B charts and #29 on The Top 40, Berry proved that his lyrics were prophetic as, indeed, there was no stopping the contagion of the rockin’ pneumonia. From that point forward, the face of music in the U.S. was changed forever.

Thank God in heaven for Charles Edward “Chuck” Berry.

Manufactured by the Wurlitzer Co. in upstate New York, jukeboxes all over the country began playing rock and roll after the introduction of Berry’s classic. From malt shops in the Midwest to honky-tonks in Texas, rock and roll was taking hold of American culture–and Wurlitzer Jukeboxes were the vehicle that delivered the sounds on the hottest stacks of wax that the country had ever heard.