At the end of a parking lot in rural Mississippi, Matthew Burford blew long warm-up tones from his trumpet into a wall of oaks and sweetgums while a familiar knot formed in his stomach. He had done this a couple of hundred times, but the nerves never failed to flare.
“I think they’re getting ready,” Burford said shortly afterward, walking to his place beside a readied grave in a 198-year-old cemetery.
As a few dozen mourners watched, a member of the Air Force approached the casket of a 92-year-old veteran and saluted. Then Burford began to play taps, the solemn bugle call that since the 1800s has been used to herald the end of a day and, in this case, the end of a life.
When his final note crescendoed to a finish, it left a chasm of silence.
It was not a perfect rendition — “a little pitchy,” Burford said later, with a quarter note that cracked near the end. But it was unique in a way that some find vastly superior to the alternative.
If Burford had not driven 115 miles to the cemetery, a recording would have been played instead from a speaker that fits into the bell of a bugle. The device allows taps to be played at every funeral with military honors, as is legally required, but it has also stirred a resistance.
Burford is one of at least 2,500 volunteers who travel to play taps at military funerals, many distressed by the idea of a recording performing the duties. They are tweens and nonagenarians, civilians and veterans. Some are seasoned musicians with an in-demand skill. Others are lapsed players who felt compelled to restart.
“It’s not like I don’t like the recording,” Burford, a 49-year-old adjunct professor who teaches classic literature at Samford University, said a few weeks before the funeral in Columbus, Miss. “I just feel like our veterans and our soldiers deserve better.”
Since Jan. 1, 2000, most veterans have been eligible to receive funeral honors that guarantee a two-person military honor detail; the folding of a U.S. flag and its presentation to the next of kin; and a rendition of taps, which can come from a recording in the absence of a bugler.
That initially included tapes and CDs played through a boombox. But in 2003 — when there were about 1,800 veteran deaths each day and only 500 military buglers — the military greenlit an electronics-augmented bugle.
“We wanted to try and keep it as realistic as possible,” said Simon Britton, who developed that technology, which is known as the Ceremonial Bugle and plays a 1999 recording from Arlington National Cemetery. He estimated that 15,000 to 20,000 have been sold.
Britton said he had received “a lot of flak from real bugle players” over the years. Musicians complain that digital bugles are deceptive and vulnerable to dying batteries and human error, like cuing the wrong tune. Some dislike their sound. Others say they sound too good.
So with demand outrunning supply, local musicians have been volunteering to play taps. Some come from two nationwide nonprofits matching horn players with the need: Bugles Across America, which contributed to more than 5,000 military funerals or ceremonial events last year, and Taps for Veterans, which served more than 700 events.
While the military said current figures were not immediately available because of the government shutdown, in 2022 an official estimated that the Defense Department provided 260,000 funeral honors annually.
Larry Schillings, the president of Bugles Across America, which was founded in 2000, had played taps as a teenager and through college after being recruited by his father, an Army National Guard officer who organized funeral honors in northern Wisconsin. He then set aside his instrument for 30 years until returning home for the funeral of his younger brother, a Vietnam War veteran.
“That’s when I found out about the boombox,” said Schillings, 77, who lives in Morristown, N.J. After locating a musician for the funeral, he bought himself a trumpet. (Taps was historically played on the bugle, which has no valves, but is now commonly performed on a trumpet.)
Taps for Veterans is led by Mark Paradis, 57, who founded the group in 2012 with the retired Air Force bugler Jari Villanueva, an expert on the history of taps.
Paradis, who lives in Harwich, Mass., played the trumpet from childhood through six years in the Marine Corps, picking it up again a decade later to help with Marine funerals and other events. “It just basically kind of blossomed into this whole other career of giving back and providing this gift of music,” he said.
Requests for taps — often with only a day or two’s notice — come from family members of the deceased, funeral directors and even the military. First Sgt. Stephen Porter, who coordinates Marine funeral honors within a 50-mile radius of Picatinny Arsenal, near Dover, N.J., has no horn players at his command. So Bugles Across America covers taps for nearly every funeral under his purview.
“Words cannot describe just how proud I am that I know them, and that they do this for the service members,” the sergeant said.
Those who play taps say it can be intensely poignant, even when honoring a stranger. It is a straightforward climb up and down an octave, but laden with meaning in a way that can make each of its 24 notes a lump of emotional concentrate.
Along with expectant mourners and sometimes merciless weather, it becomes a high-pressure moment capable of turning a simple tune into an obstacle course.
“There’s no reason to not think about every note like it’s a story, like you’re telling the story of this soldier,” said Aidan Peterson, a 19-year-old student at the Juilliard School in New York who volunteers for Bugles Across America.
Beginning as a white-gloved 9-year-old at a Coast Guard veteran’s funeral, Peterson has played taps at about 650 funerals or events, he said. He has no connection to the military, but his mother nudged him to use his passions to benefit others.
“Maybe it won’t change the world,” he said, “but it might change someone’s day.”
Dr. Lee Dodd, a retired psychiatrist in Guthrie, Okla., and a semiprofessional French horn player, learned to play the bugle so she could volunteer with Taps for Veterans.
“It just broke my heart when I realized that they were using canned music,” said Dodd, 71, who spent a decade as a computer programmer and analyst for the Army.
She has fielded calls to perform taps in the furnace of summer and in wind chills of minus 22, using a plastic mouthpiece because she feared her lips would stick to the metal. This past summer she played in a backyard as a man transferred his father’s ashes from an old metal can to the earth under a walnut tree.
In four years of volunteering, Dodd’s mind-set has evolved from stressing over perfection into appreciation for the moment. She also increasingly feels an urgency to make sure that younger musicians know this opportunity exists.
“You can’t force people to do this,” Dodd said. “They have to have it in their heart to do it, because it’s not about you. It’s not about a performance, it’s a tribute.”
Burford, the professor, had wanted to serve in the military but never did. In taps he sees a perpetual second chance.
A few weeks after the funeral in Mississippi, he was headed to the Alabama National Cemetery, near his home in Pelham, Ala. It was a cool, misty afternoon, and at this funeral of a 75-year-old Army veteran, taps was played after three rifle shots, a handshake of jarring and soothing sounds.
Twenty-five years in, volunteering at first on his own and since 2022 for Bugles Across America, Burford is still unwrapping layers of meaning in the liturgical-like funeral process, and in the opportunity to show up with something authentic for strangers.
“I never would have thought that the two things that I’m going to be buried with will be my Bible and my trumpet,” Burford said.
Several minutes later, he had a change of heart about the instrument: “It’s not going to do anybody any good sitting in a coffin.”
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