Georgie Stoll

Georgie Stoll was born George Martin Stoll in Minneapolis in 1905 and first won fame as a boy violin prodigy. In the 1920s he toured the vaudeville circuits as a jazz violinist, including with a popular group called the Jazzmania Quintet, and he soon began leading his own bands on radio.

In 1934 Bing Crosby chose Stoll as musical director for his CBS radio series, and two years later Georgie Stoll and His Orchestra accompanied Crosby and Louis Armstrong on their hit Decca recordings from Pennies from Heaven. In 1937 he joined the music department at MGM, beginning a career of nearly three decades at the studio.

Stoll became one of MGM's mainstays during the golden age of the movie musical. As musical director and conductor, he worked on Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, For Me and My Gal, Meet Me in St. Louis and In the Good Old Summertime, along with several of Esther Williams's aquatic musicals. He was a favorite of Garland and worked often with producers Arthur Freed, Roger Edens and Joe Pasternak.

He won the Academy Award for Anchors Aweigh (1945), the Technicolor musical in which Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra play sailors on leave in Hollywood. On that film he worked with Calvin Jackson, one of the first Black arrangers at MGM, whom Stoll had recruited. Stoll received nine Oscar nominations in all, the last for Billy Rose's Jumbo in 1962. He retired in the mid-1960s and died in Monterey, California, in 1985.