Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was one of the most successful performing artists of the 20th century.  Arguably the first true multi-media star, Bing Crosby's influence on popular culture and popular music is enormous -- from 1934 to 1954 he held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. One of the first true superstars of our time, he was usually considered to be a member of popular music's "holy trinity" of ultra-icons, alongside Elvis Presley and The Beatles.

Crosby popularized singing with conversational ease, or crooning. His musical interpretations amalgamated rhythm and romance with scat singing, whistling, rhythmic improvisation and melodic paraphrasing as elements of a hotter, sexier sound than had been conceived before.

Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers that followed him, including the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Dean Martin. Tony Bennett summed up Crosby's impact stating, "Bing created a culture. He contributed more to popular music than any other person - he molded popular music. Every singer in the business has taken something from Crosby. Every male singer has a Bing Crosby idiosyncrasy."

Crosby also exerted a massive influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947 he invested $50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer in the world to pre-record his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. He was, with Frank Sinatra, one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles.

Bing Crosby's desire to pre-record his radio shows, combined with a dissatisfaction with the available aluminum recording discs, was a significant factor in the development of magnetic tape recording and the radio industry's adoption of it. He used his power to innovate new methods of reproducing himself. In 1946 he wanted to shift from live performance to recorded transcriptions for his weekly radio show on NBC sponsored by Kraft. But NBC refused to allow recorded radio programs (except for advertisements).

The live production of radio shows was a deeply-established tradition reinforced by the ASCAP union. The new ABC network, formed out of the sale of the old NBC Blue network in 1943 to Edward Noble, the "Lifesaver King," was willing to break the tradition. It would pay Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday sponsored by Philco – remember, this is 1943!  He would also get $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 60-minute show that was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch aluminum discs that played 10 minutes per side at 33⅓ rpm. Crosby wanted to change to recorded production for several reasons. The legend that has been most often told is that it would give him more time for his golf game. And he did record his first Philco program in August 1947 so he could enter the Jasper National Park Invitational Gold Tournament in September when the new radio season was to start.

This disc contains 404 half-hour variety episodes of The Bing Crosby Show, as well as several radio specials and tributes to this pioneer of popular music.