Satchmo, Ruggles & Abe

Today marks 160 years since the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg and of President Abraham Lincoln's little speech.  Here are recitations by two glorious Americans, Louis Armstrong and Charles Laughton, the first born in Jim Crow New Orleans and who became a proud symbol of our country, the latter born in England, and who became an American citizen.

In The Archivist, we learned about Louis Armstrong's collection of tapes, recording whatever caught his broad interests.  In 1958, on a tape that included music from Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, and a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope single, Armstrong recorded what he wrote as "Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech.  Narrated (by Louis Satchmo Armstrong)".  You can listen to it here.

Armstrong always maintained he was born on July 4.  While many researchers dispute this, I'm sticking with Louis.  

In 1935, Laughton played the role of an English butler transported to backwoods America in Ruggles of Red Gap.  As he learns about America he decides to strike out on his own.  This is the famous scene in which he recites the address.

Speaking of Laughton, I must recommend viewing the only film he directed, The Night of the Hunter.  Once seen, you will never forget it.

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863