Decca Records in the context of Andrews Sisters

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made significant contributions to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Holiday was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem where she was heard by producer John Hammond, who liked her voice. Holiday signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Her collaboration with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. However, by the late 1940s, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, Holiday performed a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.She was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s, with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Because of personal struggles and an altered voice, Holiday's final recordings were met with mixed reaction, but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died of cirrhosis and heart failure on July 17, 1959, at age 44.

Music Corporation of America, formerly known as Universal Music Group Nashville, is Universal Music Group's country music subsidiary. It was officially opened in 1945 as Decca Records' country music division (now MCA Nashville). Capitol Records opened its Nashville office in 1950 and Mercury Nashville was founded in 1957. Some of the labels in this group include MCA Records Nashville, Mercury Nashville Records, Capitol Records Nashville and EMI Records Nashville. UMG Nashville not only handles these imprints, but also manages the country music catalogues of record labels Universal Music and predecessor companies acquired over the years including ABC Records, Decca Records, Dot Records, DreamWorks Records, Kapp Records, MGM Records and Polydor Records.

On April 25, 2025, Universal Music Group Nashville was officially renamed as the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which marked the return of the name previously used by UMG's predecessor parent company MCA Inc. from 1924 to 1996 and its subsidiary MCA Records as well as Universal Pictures's predecessor parent company MCA Inc. from 1962 to 1996 and its Revue Studios/Universal Television division.

Mark Nelson Chesnutt (born September 6, 1963) is an American country music singer and songwriter. Between 1990 and 1999, he had his greatest chart success recording for Universal Music Group Nashville's MCA and Decca branches, with a total of eight albums between those two labels. During this timespan, Chesnutt also charted twenty top-ten hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, of which eight reached number one: "Brother Jukebox", "I'll Think of Something", "It Sure Is Monday", "Almost Goodbye", "I Just Wanted You to Know", "Gonna Get a Life", "It's a Little Too Late", and a cover of Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing". His first three albums for MCA (Too Cold at Home, Longnecks & Short Stories, and Almost Goodbye) along with a 1996 Greatest Hits package issued on Decca are all certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); 1994's What a Way to Live, also issued on Decca, is certified gold. After a self-titled album in 2002 on Columbia Records, Chesnutt has continued to record predominantly on independent labels.

Chesnutt is known for his neotraditionalist country and honky-tonk influences, with frequent stylistic comparisons to George Jones. He has recorded several cover songs as both singles and album cuts, including covers of Hank Williams Jr., John Anderson, Don Gibson, Conway Twitty, and Charlie Rich. Artists with whom he has collaborated include Jones, Tracy Byrd, Vince Gill, and Alison Krauss. Mark Wright produced all but one of his albums released in the 1990s, while his work since 2005 has been produced by Jimmy Ritchey. Chesnutt has also won two awards from the Country Music Association: the Horizon Award (now known as Best New Artist) and Vocal Event of the Year, both in 1993.

The Fitzwilliam Quartet or Fitzwilliam String Quartet (FSQ) is a British string quartet founded in 1968 by four Cambridge undergraduates. The quartet is one of the longest-established chamber ensembles in the world and is particularly noted for its close association with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who entrusted them with the Western premières of his last three string quartets. The FSQ was the first group outside the Soviet Union to perform and record all fifteen of Shostakovich's string quartets, a cycle that earned them international acclaim and a long-term recording contract with Decca.

The quartet's Shostakovich recordings were highly decorated, winning the first-ever Gramophone Award for Chamber Music in 1977 and being included in Gramophone magazine's "100 Greatest-ever Recordings" in 2005. The composer himself held the quartet in high regard, reportedly telling Benjamin Britten that the Fitzwilliam were his "preferred performers of my quartets".

Call Me Mister is a revue with sketches by Arnold Auerbach and words and music by Harold Rome. The title refers to troops who are happily returning to civilian life and no longer want to be addressed by their military ranks.

The Broadway production, directed by Robert H. Gordon, opened on April 18, 1946 at the National Theatre. It transferred twice, to the Majestic and the Plymouth, before completing its run of 734 performances. The cast included Betty Garrett, George S. Irving, Maria Karnilova, Harry Clark, Jules Munshin, and Lawrence Winters. A cast recording was released by Decca Records.

Although early advocates such as Robert Kajanus, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Serge Koussevitzky had conducted many of Sibelius's symphonies for gramophone in the 1930s and 1940s, none of these Sibelians recorded all seven. Instead, the earliest complete traversal dates to 1953, four years before the composer's death on 20 September 1957; it is by Sixten Ehrling and the Stockholm Radio Orchestra, recorded from 1952 to 1953 for the Swedish label Metronome Records (released by Mercury Records in the United States). Ehrling had outpaced Anthony Collins and the London Symphony Orchestra, whose cycle—recorded from 1952 to 1955 on Decca Records—was concurrent with Ehrling's but arrived second. Since these two pioneering examples, the Sibelius cycle has, as of May 2025, been recorded an additional 49 times. The most recently completed (51st) cycle, finished in 2025, is by Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra; an additional two projected cycles are in progress, according to press releases.

Sir Edward Roberts Lewis (19 April 1900 – 29 January 1980) was an English businessman, best known for leading the Decca recording and technology group for five decades from 1929. He built the company up from nothing to one of the major record labels of the world.

A financier by profession, Lewis was professionally engaged by the fledgling Decca company. Having failed to persuade its directors to diversify from making record-players to making records, he raised the capital to take the company over, and ran it until his death. Among the ground-breaking achievements of Decca under Lewis were the "Decca Navigation System" (the leading maritime and aviation navigation system prior to GPS), the Decca "ffrr" recording technology, and the first release on record of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Charles Hardin Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959), known professionally by his stage name Buddy Holly, was an American singer, songwriter, and musician who was a central and pioneering figure of rock and roll. He was born to a musical family in Lubbock, Texas, during the Great Depression, and learned to play guitar and sing alongside his two siblings.

Holly made his first appearance on local television in 1952, and the following year he formed the group Buddy and Bob with his friend Bob Montgomery. In 1955, after opening once for Elvis Presley, Holly decided to pursue a career in music. He played with Presley three times that year, and his band's style shifted from country and western to rock and roll. In October that year, when Holly opened for Bill Haley & His Comets, he was spotted by Nashville scout Eddie Crandall, who helped him get a contract with Decca Records.