Bing Crosby in the context of "Jimmy Dorsey"

Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis after his acquisition of a gramophone manufacturer, The Decca Gramophone Company. It set up an American subsidiary under the Decca name, which became an independent company just before the Second World War. The American spin-off became a subsidiary of MCA Inc. in 1962. Known for its technical innovations, the British parent company grew to become the second most successful recording company in Britain and celebrated fifty years of existence in 1979, shortly before being sold to PolyGram. Both Decca and its former subsidiary were subsequently acquired by Universal Music.

Decca and its American spin-off both built up strong catalogues of popular music. In their first two decades, their artists included Gertrude Lawrence, George Formby, Jack Hylton and Vera Lynn in Britain and Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers in the US. Later performers in their popular catalogues included in the US Bill Haley & His Comets and Buddy Holly plus in the UK Elvis Presley (licensed from RCA Records), Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan, Chuck Berry (licensed from Chess Records), Johnny Cash (licensed from Sun Records), Eddie Cochran (licensed from Liberty Records), and the Rolling Stones.

The Country Girl is a 1954 American drama film written and directed by George Seaton and starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and William Holden. Adapted by Seaton from Clifford Odets's 1950 play of the same name, the film is about an alcoholic has-been actor who is given one last chance to resurrect his career. The film was entered in the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

Seaton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay while Kelly won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role, which previously had earned Uta Hagen her first Tony Award in the play's original Broadway production. The role was as the alcoholic actor's long-suffering wife.

High Society is a 1956 American musical romantic comedy film directed by Charles Walters and starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. The film was produced by Sol C. Siegel for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter.

The film is a musical remake of the 1940 screwball comedy film The Philadelphia Story, which was based on the 1939 play The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry. High Society's screenplay was written by John Patrick and involves a successful popular jazz musician (Crosby) who tries to win back the affections of his ex-wife (Kelly), who is preparing to marry another man. The cast also features Celeste Holm, John Lund, and Louis Calhern, in his final film, with a musical contribution by Louis Armstrong. The film was Kelly's last professional appearance before she married Prince Rainier III and became Princess consort of Monaco.

Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro; October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) was an American musician who is credited as the father of jazz guitar. During the 1920s, he gave the guitar a prominence it previously lacked as a solo instrument, as part of a band or orchestra, and as accompaniment for vocalists. He recorded duets with guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Carl Kress and jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and played rhythm guitar in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and was the favoured accompanist of Bing Crosby.

King of Jazz is a 1930 American pre-Code color musical film starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. In the 1920s Whiteman signed and featured jazz musicians including Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (both are seen and heard in the film), Bix Beiderbecke (who had left before filming began), Frank Trumbauer, and others.

King of Jazz was filmed in the early two-color Technicolor process and was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. for Universal Pictures. The film featured several songs sung on camera by the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Al Rinker and Harry Barris), as well as off-camera solo vocals by Crosby during the opening credits and, very briefly, during a cartoon sequence. King of Jazz still survives in a near-complete color print and is not a lost film, unlike many contemporary musicals that now exist only either in incomplete form or as black-and-white reduction copies.

Hans Wild (1912–1969) was a British photographer who worked for Life magazine from 1938 to 1946. Some of his best known work appeared on the cover of Life including a photo of historian Charles Seltman in 1943 and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill while painting with an easel in 1946.

Wild became a professional photographer at 24 years old in 1936, and worked for Life in various capacities in the United States, England, France and Italy. He took numerous photos documenting World War II, as well as portraits of famous people including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Vivien Leigh, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Bing Crosby, actress Pat Kirkwood, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, E. V. Knox editor of Punch, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Rupert Neve, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, Laurence Olivier, Daphne du Maurier, C. S. Lewis, Alexander Fleming, Chinese Ambassador Guo Taiqi, Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, Benjamin Britten, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and American diplomats Jefferson Caffery and Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr., Louis II, Prince of Monaco with Ghislaine Dommanget and Rainier III, Robert Anthony Eden, David Lloyd George, Thomas Beecham.

George Warren Barnes (July 17, 1921– September 5, 1977) was an American jazz guitarist. He was also a conductor, composer, arranger, producer, author, and educator. He was hired by the NBC Orchestra at the age of 17, making him the youngest musician on staff. At 17, he was considered to be a great player by many musicians, including Tommy Dorsey, and Jimmy McPartland. Barnes was also proficient as a recording engineer. During his career, Barnes recorded with singers Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Patti Page, Dinah Washington, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine and Johnny Mathis among many others.He was an inspiration to, and influenced guitarists Chet Atkins, Roy Clark, Herb Ellis and Merle Travis, among many others.

Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado, unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology.

Ampex's first great success was a line of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby. Ampex quickly became a leader in audio tape technology, developing many of the analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s. Starting in the 1950s, the company began developing video tape recorders, and later introduced the helical scan concept that made home video players possible. They also introduced multi-track recording, slow-motion and instant playback television, and a host of other advances. Ampex's tape business was rendered obsolete during the 1990s, and the company turned to digital storage products.

"I'm Coming Virginia" is a song composed in 1926 by Donald Heywood with lyrics by Will Marion Cook. It is often wrongly attributed to vocalist Ethel Waters, who first recorded it on September 18, 1926, with Will Marion Cook's Singing Orchestra. Waters is credited with popularizing it. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, pianist Fats Waller (with Fletcher Henderson) and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra featuring Bing Crosby all recorded it in 1927. The song has become a jazz standard performed by Dixieland musicians.

Frederick Theodore Tavares (18 February 1913 – July 24, 1990) was an American designer, engineer, and musician who played with Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Henry Mancini and many others, and was also a key figure at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation for many decades. Tavares is perhaps best known for his role in designing the Fender Stratocaster, the Fender Precision Bass and other Fender instruments and amplifiers (including the classic Bassman amp).