The Story of Taps
About the words to taps
and the words for taps.
The 24-note melancholy bugle call
known as "taps" is thought to be a revision of a French bugle
signal, called "tattoo," that notified soldiers to cease an
evening's drinking and return to their garrisons. It was sounded an hour
before the final bugle call to end the day by extinguishing fires and
lights. The last five measures of the tattoo resemble taps.
The word "taps" is an alteration of the
obsolete word "taptoo," derived from the Dutch "taptoe."
Taptoe was the command - "Tap toe!" - to shut ("toe
to") the "tap" of a keg.
The revision that gave us present-day taps was made
during America's Civil War by Union Gen. Daniel Adams Butterfield, heading
a brigade camped at Harrison Landing, Va., near Richmond. Up to that time,
the U.S. Army's infantry call to end the day was the French final call,
"L'Extinction des feux." Gen. Butterfield decided the
"lights out" music was too formal to signal the day's end. One
day in July 1862 he recalled the tattoo music and hummed a version of it
to an aide, who wrote it down in music. Butterfield then asked the brigade
bugler, Oliver W. Norton, to play the notes and, after listening,
lengthened and shortened them while keeping his original melody.
He ordered Norton to play this new call at the end of
each day thereafter, instead of the regulation call. The music was heard
and appreciated by other brigades, who asked for copies and adopted this
bugle call. It was even adopted by Confederate buglers.
This music was made the official Army bugle call after
the war, but not given the name "taps" until 1874.
The first time taps was played at a military funeral
may also have been in Virginia soon after Butterfield composed it. Union
Capt. John Tidball, head of an artillery battery, ordered it played for
the burial of a cannoneer killed in action. Not wanting to reveal the
battery's position in the woods to the enemy nearby, Tidball substituted
taps for the traditional three rifle volleys fired over the grave. Taps
was played at the funeral of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson 10 months
after it was composed. Army infantry regulations by 1891 required taps to
be played at military funeral ceremonies.
Taps now is played by the military at burial and
memorial services, to accompany the lowering of the flag and to signal the
"lights out" command at day's end.
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