The Song

In Waterloo, NY, in 1866, a group gathered at the cemetery to put flowers and flags on the graves of the recently killed soldiers of the Civil War.

It was not a federal holiday until I was 15 years old. Now, it seems more like the opening of summer.

But the purpose of Memorial Day is not barbecues and beaches but to remember 1.1 million men and women who paid with their lives for the freedom to have barbecues and go to beaches.

But associated with it are 24 simple notes which preceded the event.

In July 1862, U.S. General Daniel Butterfield and his brigade were camped at Harrison’s Landing, Virginia, recuperating after the Seven Days Battles near Richmond. He did not like the song that signaled the day’s end.

So, he refashioned it into what he considered more pleasing. He gave the music to brigade bugler Private Oliver Wilcox Norton, who played it as the sunset.

A few days later, the battalion buried a fallen soldier. Captain John Tidball decided it would be safer to play the 24-note song rather than fire rifles and beat drums. Since it replaced the beat of the drums, they called it a more diminutive name…Taps.

Christianity remembers the dead but calls us to a new day, a day in which the songs played over bodies fall silent. Paul put it in the minds of the Thessalonians.

“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17, ESV)

While a sad trumpet plays at a grave, a joyful trumpet will signal a new day one day. Remember both.

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