Fee fife fo fum? (Lincoln Through the Lens)

Before the annual Patriots Day “Lincoln Salute: A Festival of Fife & Drum Music” featuring some of the best fife and drum groups from New England, the United States, and abroad, the groups are invited to the Pierce House for a luncheon hosted by the 4-H Fifes & Drums and the Lincoln Minute Men. But it wasn’t the British Invasion.

Because fifers and drummers stood alongside officers and played a vital role in communication in 18th-century armies, it was important for officers to be able to identify musicians readily—so if the coat colors of the unit, for instance, were blue coats with red facings, then the musicians would wear red coats with blue facings, explained Don Hafner, a Belmont resident and professor of political science at Boston College.

Thus, the redcoats who appear to be invading the Pierce House are in fact “friendlies”—American fifers and drummers. And the young man in the blue coat with red facings (below right) from the William Diamond Junior Fife & Drum Corps is wearing what the regular soldiers would have worn (though as a musician, he really should have been in red as well, Hafner noted).

(Photos courtesy Nancy Beach)

The musicians gathered at the Brooks School Auditorium in Lincoln later in the afternoon (rather than Pierce Park in a concession to the weather) for a fife and drum concert. Other guests at this year’s event included the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife & Drum Corps, the Colonial Williamsburg Fife & Drum Corps, the 1st Michigan Colonial Fife & Drum Corps, the Bluff Point Quahog Diggers, the Musick of Prescott’s Battalion, the Sudbury Ancients, and the Aleppo Pipe Band.