First Things First

Country Gets a Rap!

Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson team up to "buy my medicine."

"Poor Old Dirt Farmer"

Happy Mother's Day!

The above sketch is by Norman Rockwell.

Negro Spirituals: "Just The Black Notes"

Wintley Phipps, the president of the US Dream Academy, offers a rendition of Amazing Grace that simply overwhelms the imagination.  It’s unforgettable.

The US Dream Academy is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to help and inspire children whose misfortune is to have family members in prison.

Watch this inspiring video:

 

Address of Pope Benedict XVI

Address of Pope Benedict XVI

Welcome Ceremony
The White House, South Lawn
Washington, D.C.
April 16, 2008

"Mr. President,

"Thank you for your gracious words of welcome on behalf of the people of the United States of America.  I deeply appreciate your invitation to visit this great country.  My visit coincides with an important moment in the life of the Catholic community in America: the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the elevation of the country’s first Diocese – Baltimore – to a metropolitan Archdiocese, and the establishment of the Sees of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Louisville.  Yet I am happy to be here as a guest of all Americans.  I come as a friend, a preacher of the Gospel and one with great respect for this vast pluralistic society.  America’s Catholics have made, and continue to make, an excellent contribution to the life of their country.  As I begin my visit, I trust that my presence will be a source of renewal and hope for the Church in the United States, and strengthen the resolve of Catholics to contribute ever more responsibly to the life of this nation, of which they are proud to be citizens.

Little Richard Introduces Jimi Hendrix

Little Richard comments on the guitar artistry of Jimi Hendrix!  Then Hendrix plays a jazz rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock in August, 1969.  At the end, Jimi Hendrix discussses his critically acclaimed performance on the Dick Cavett Show.

RFK: The Mindless Menace Of Violence

Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  On this fortieth anniversary of that eventful tragedy, read his Letter From Birmingham Jail.

Happy Easter!

Happy President's Day

Abraham Lincoln

The Gettysburg Address

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot 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."