Rain or shine, Angela Burch’s bugle is at the ready.
Unfortunately, Monday’s wet weather forced a rare rainout for the community’s annual Memorial Day service, but it’s just one of the occasions throughout the year when Kilgore Police Department’s Evidence Officer breaks out the brass in honor of local veterans.
In fact, Burch has been on Taps most of her life. That includes the entirety of her career with KPD (Burch recently marked three decades with the agency, serving for years in the Criminal Investigative Unit), but she first learned to play the piece at Sabine High School.
“I asked my band director what instrument had the most solos,” she says. “He told me the trumpet, and that’s what I wanted to play.”
Years later, she signed on with Kilgore PD. “When the department learned I could play, they asked me to do it, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Back then, Burch was performing the 24-note signal on a second-hand trumpet. Around 2007, the late Ronnie Moore – former Kilgore Public Safety Director – purchased regulation bugles for both Burch and former officer and detective John Rowe.
It was the ideal choice: Taps is not a song but, rather, a bugle call, according to USMemorialDay.org: “The official military Taps is played by a single bugle or trumpet at dusk, during flag ceremonies and at military funerals by the United States Armed Forces.”
As a go-to bugle player, Burch typically performs four or five times a year, on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the Giants of Law Enforcement Banquet and at special request by veterans and their families.
“It’s my way of honoring those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the military,” she says.
There are differing accounts of the origin of Taps, and people have penned various lyrics to the tune, such as: “Day is done, gone the sun // From the hills, from the lake, from the skies // All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.”
In any case, Burch is content to play and let the song touch her audience, glad to spare them a recorded rendition.
“It doesn’t matter if I make a mistake, they still love it because it’s coming from an actual human and not a machine.”
Often, she’s playing with her husband, Ron, at her side. A U.S. Army veteran, he served as a sergeant in Big Red One Division at Fort Riley with the transportation corps.
“What’s cool is my dad was also part of Big Red One,” Ofc. Burch said, and she was born at the Kansas post while Calvin Porter was serving. “He was part of the tanker division.”
For one performance, among many across decades, Burch was excited to play Taps in a duet with her sister, Shannon Arnold, and she recalls playing it back in the years the local Memorial Day service was held at Kilgore Memorial Gardens before the U.S. Veterans Monument was constructed at Harris Street Park.
She’s quick to step up whenever any local veteran requests a live performance among the military honors of their funeral.
In addition to her father and her husband, Burch’s grandfather, Charles Porter, served in World War II.
“He spent a lot of his time in the military overseas and over here,” Burch recalls, and he was a proud admirer of his granddaughter’s skill on the bugle: “Every time he heard me play it, he would always tear up to think of the memories he witnessed overseas.
“That just really touched me.”
One common set of Taps lyrics reads:
Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake, from the skies.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.
Go to sleep, peaceful sleep, may the soldier
or sailor, God keep. On the land or the deep, Safe in sleep.
Love, good night, must thou go,
when the day, and the night need thee so?
All is well. Speedeth all To their rest.
Fades the light;
And afar Goeth day,
And the stars Shineth bright,
Fare thee well;
Day has gone, night is on.
Thanks and praise, for our days,
'Neath the sun, Neath the stars, 'Neath the sky,
As we go, this we know, God is nigh.
