Taps: How a Medal of Honor Recipient Gave America its Most Famous Military Bugle Call Ever

Daniel Butterfield could not read or write music, but he knew what he liked. A brigadier general in the Union Army who would go on to receive the Medal of Honor in 1892 for gallantry during the Civil War, Butterfield was not particularly enamored with the bugle call that signaled lights out to U.S. troops at the end of the day.

One day in July 1862, Butterfield summoned his brigade's bugler, Oliver Willcox Norton, and suggested he play a series of notes that were less formal than the official call of "Extinguish Lights." Norton followed Butterfield's instructions, and after a few tweaks, what resulted was the U.S. military's most popular bugle call of them all: Taps.

"There is something singularly beautiful and appropriate in the music of this wonderful call," Norton would later recall in an undated article called "The Origin of 'Taps'". "Its strains are melancholy, yet full of rest and peace. Its echoes linger in the heart long after its tones have ceased to vibrate in the air."