48 Facts About Decca Records

Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis.

The U S Decca label was the foundation company that evolved into UMG .

Name dates back to a portable gramophone called the "Decca Records Dulcephone" patented in 1914 by musical instrument makers Barnett Samuel and Sons.

In classical music, Decca Records had a long way to go from its modest beginnings to catch up with the established HMV and Columbia labels .

Decca Records released the stereo recordings of Ernest Ansermet conducting L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, including, in 1959, the first complete stereo LP recording of The Nutcracker, as well as Ansermet's only stereo version of Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat, which the conductor had led at its first performance in 1919.

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Decca Records's skill, coupled with Decca's sound engineering capabilities, took the label into the first flight of recording companies.

Decca Records's pioneering recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Georg Solti was a huge artistic and commercial success .

Solti recorded throughout his career for Decca Records, and made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets.

American Decca Records actively re-entered the classical music field in 1950 with distribution deals from Deutsche Grammophon and Parlophone.

American Decca Records began issuing its own classical music recordings in 1956 when Israel Horowitz joined Decca Records to head its classical music operations.

Many years, Decca's British classical recordings had been issued in the U S under the London Records label because the existence of the American Decca company precluded the use of that name on British recordings distributed in the U S When the MCA and PolyGram labels merged in 1999 and created Universal Music, the practice was no longer necessary.

Today Decca Records makes fewer major classical recordings, but still has a full roster of stars, including Cecilia Bartoli and Renee Fleming.

In Britain, Decca bought out the bankrupt U K branch of Brunswick Records in 1932, which added such stars as Bing Crosby and Al Jolsonto its roster.

Decca Records bought out the Melotone and Edison Bell record companies.

In establishing the American unit, the founders bought the former Brunswick Decca Records pressing plants in New York City and Muskegon, Michigan, which were shut down in 1931, from Warner Bros.

Decca Records became a major player in the depressed American record market thanks to its roster of popular artists, particularly Bing Crosby, the shrewd management of former US Brunswick general manager Jack Kapp, and the decision to price Decca Records at 35 cents.

In 1941, American Decca acquired Brunswick Records and its sublabel Vocalion Records from Warner Bros.

In 1940, American Decca Records released the first album of songs from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

In 1942, American Decca Records released the first recording of "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby.

Decca Records recorded another version of the song in 1947 for Decca; to this day, Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" for Decca remains the best-selling single worldwide of all time.

Columbia Decca Records followed with musical theatre albums, starting with the 1946 revival of Show Boat.

Decca Records throughout the 1930s and early to mid-1940s was a leading label of blues and jump music with such best selling artists as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Louis Jordan .

Since Decca Records had access to the stereo tracks of the Oscar-winning film, they quickly released a stereo version in 1958.

In June and July 1957, Decca Records released the soundtracks from Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions' film Sweet Smell of Success.

In 1961, American Decca Records released the soundtrack album of Flower Drum Song, Universal Pictures' film version of the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

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Decca Records had earlier accepted London-born pioneer rock'n'roll singer Terry Dene, who was later known as the British Elvis Presley, and another Merseyside singer, Billy Fury.

Decca Records produced Rock Island Line, the breakthrough skiffle hit for Lonnie Donegan, and he is credited as the first executive to spot the potential of singer-actor Tommy Steele.

Decca Records is credited with battling against Decca's notorious parsimonious treatment of their artists, ensuring that the Moody Blues had the time and resources to develop beyond their beat group origins into progressive rock, and he used profits for pop sales to cross-subsidise recordings by avant garde jazz artists like John Surman.

British Decca lost a key source for American records when Atlantic Records switched British distribution to Polydor Records in 1966 in order for Atlantic to gain access to British recording artists which they did not have under Decca distribution.

Decca's deals with numerous other record labels began to fall apart: RCA Records, for instance, abandoned Decca to set up its own UK office in June 1969, just before the Rolling Stones decided to abandon Decca in favour of forming their own label.

Decca Records's fortunes declined slightly during the 1970s, and it had few major commercial successes; among those were Dana's 1970 two-million selling single, "All Kinds of Everything", issued on their subsidiary label Rex Records.

King had a hit, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon", on Decca Records while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Edward Lewis recruited him as his personal assistant and "talent spotter".

American Decca Records released several notable spoken word albums, such as a recording of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol starring Ronald Colman as Scrooge, and a recording of the Christmas chapter from The Pickwick Papers read by Charles Laughton.

British Decca released on LP, in 1968, the most complete version of Man of La Mancha ever put on vinyl records, a 2-LP album featuring most of the dialogue and all of the songs, performed by the show's original London cast.

Around 1970, American Decca enjoyed success with LPS of soundtrack dialogue excerpts from the films of W C Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West.

Decca Records's recorded two more albums, and released numerous singles, before her untimely death in a 1963 plane crash.

Decca Records's was the biggest selling female country artist of the 1960s and 70s.

In 1949, in both the UK and the US, Decca Records took up the LP promptly and enthusiastically giving the British arm an enormous advantage over EMI, which for some years tried to stick exclusively to the old format, thereby forfeiting competitive advantage to Decca Records, both artistically and financially.

British Decca Records recorded high fidelity versions of all the symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams except for the ninth, under the personal supervision of the composer, with Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

British Decca Records recording engineers Arthur Haddy, Roy Wallace and Kenneth Wilkinson developed in 1954 the famous Decca Records tree, a stereo microphone recording system for big orchestras.

Decca Records archives show that Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande recorded Antar by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov ; Stenka Razin by Alexander Glazunov; Tamara by Mily Balakirev; Anatoly Liadov's Baba-Yaga, Eight Russian Folksongs, Kikimora; and Le Martyre de saint Sebastien by Claude Debussy.

Decca Records recorded some quadrophonic masters that were released in Sansui's quadraphonic system called QS Regular Matrix.

Decca Records is routinely mastering new recordings in these formats.

American Decca Records bought Universal-International in 1952, and eventually merged with MCA Inc in 1962, becoming a subsidiary company under MCA.

In Britain, London Decca Records became a mighty catch-all licensing label for foreign recordings from the nascent post-WW II American independent and semi-major labels such as Cadence, Dot, Chess, Atlantic, Imperial and Liberty.

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Conversely, British Decca retained a non-reciprocal right to license and issue American Decca recordings in the UK on their Brunswick and Coral labels; this arrangement continued until 1967 when a UK branch of MCA was established utilising the MCA Records label, with distribution fluctuating between British Decca and other English companies over time.

The name remains until 2002, when it decided to sell its 60 percent stake, and changed its name to Linfair Decca Records, making the company independent from Universal Music.

Today, Decca Records is a leading label for both classical music and Broadway scores although it is branching out into pop music from established recording stars: in 2007 its Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA by Boyz II Men reached No 27 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.