Presidents, Sports Greats Featured in ‘Great Speeches’

With most of the CD box sets being released in anticipation of the holiday sales season, the main selling point is either the number of hit singles or a teasing array of previously unreleased material.

Among the pop artists being saluted with box sets this season: Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand, Patsy Cline, Fats Domino, the Monkees, Crosby, Stills & Nash and producer Phil Spector. Between them, the collections probably feature more than 200 pop, country and R&B; hits.

But one of the most intriguing new box sets doesn’t have any pop hits--in the traditional sense. Rhino Records’ “Great Speeches of the 20th Century” contains key excerpts from some of the most famous speeches or commentaries since the arrival of recording technology. The voices heard in the four-disc set range from U.S. Presidents to baseball heroes.

In the set’s liner notes, album producer-compiler Gordon Skene says “Great Speeches” is the result of “sifting through” more than 7,000 hours of tapes, transcriptions, records and cylinders.

“The first few decades of recording and broadcasting were crude by today’s standards,” writes Skene, an audio historian. “Some voices sound stiff and formal, while others, broadcasting via shortwave, sound dim and distant. Before the advent of audiotape in the late 1940s, sound was recorded either on wax disc or transcription. Some significant speeches have withered with time, but every attempt has been made to restore (the) selections and present them in the best possible sound.”

James Austin, project supervisor for Rhino Records, said the package is designed for both students and the average consumer. “If we had just aimed the album at schools or libraries, we would have done it more along chronological lines. But we wanted this also to be accessible and entertaining, so we divided the speeches into specific categories--such as political and controversial as well as inspirational.”

The voices heard in the set range from President Franklin D. Roosevelt (the 1933 inaugural address telling the economically troubled country, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and Gen. Douglas MacArthur (the 1951 address to Congress that included the line, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away”) to Lou Gehrig (his 1939 farewell to baseball, where a terminally ill Gehrig said, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth”) to President John F. Kennedy (the “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” line from his 1961 inaugural address).

Who appears most often in the set?

The answer: President Richard M. Nixon, whose eight excepts range from his 1952 “Checkers” speech (“I want to tell you my side of the case”) to his 1973 remarks in response to the release of the Watergate tapes (“. . . I am not a crook”).