He’s racked up thousands of miles on his odometer, but he doesn’t complain about the long hours he spends on the road, and he never accepts payment for his services.
Seaman, 61, began volunteering after his wife’s father passed away and he learned that veterans’ families often struggle to find musicians to sound taps for them. In 2002, buglers were in such short supply that the Pentagon started distributing electronic instrument inserts that play a recording of taps.
The birth of Taps
During the Civil War, Union General Daniel Adams Butterfield scrawled a series of notes on the back of an envelope and instructed his brigade bugler, Oliver Wilcox Norton, to sound the tune to honor their fallen comrades.
These “digital” bugles are now the norm at military funerals throughout the country, though Seaman wishes that weren’t the case. “Veterans deserve better than a CD player or a fake,” he says.
Seaman owns more than 30 bugles and 60 other horns (including a plastic horn made during World War II, when brass was scarce), and he’s jammed with some of the city’s greatest blues and jazz musicians. But he considers his volunteer work as a bugler his most meaningful musical project. “It touches me,” he says simply.
Sounding Board
Looking for a volunteer bugler? Taps for Veterans and Bugles Across America can help you find one.
