Why bagpipes play at American funerals

Every time there is a police or firefighter funeral in an American film, the same scene appears: a uniformed piper, alone, playing Amazing Grace from a distance. The scene is so familiar that we no longer ask why. But the reason is not aesthetic, it is not ancient, and it has nothing to do with Scotland in the way people imagine.

The only job available

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Famine expelled more than a million people from Ireland in less than a decade. Many arrived on the East Coast of the United States. Those who reached New York, Boston or Philadelphia found a society that did not want them: signs on shop doors reading “No Irish Need Apply”, relegated neighbourhoods, concentrated poverty, active discrimination.

In that context, two public jobs were among the few accessible to newly arrived Celtic immigrants: the fire brigades and the police departments. Not because there was any welcome, but because they were hard, poorly paid, and high-mortality work. They were left for them because nobody else wanted them.

Irish and Scottish immigrants took them. And with them, they brought their customs.

Bagpipes at the funerals of the fallen

When a colleague died in the line of duty, the community responded with what it knew how to do: a Celtic funeral. Bagpipes had accompanied the burials of their dead long before they arrived in America. It was not a conscious cultural gesture — it was simply what was done.

Over time, these communities created the Emerald Societies: associations of firefighters and police officers of Irish origin that formalised the tradition, organised pipe bands and drums, and turned it into the official protocol for service funerals. From there it spread to the military and to emergency service families in general, by then without distinction of origin.

The rite stopped being Irish and became American. But the bagpipes remained.

Why the Scottish bagpipe and not the Irish

Here is a technical detail that matters. Ireland has its own bagpipe: the Uilleann pipe, a beautiful, chromatic instrument with a soft timbre. It is played seated, with the bellows under the arm. Moderate volume, very interior.

The Great Highland Bagpipe — the bagpipe of the Scottish Highlands — is another thing entirely. It is played standing, in motion, with the bag under the left arm and the drone over the shoulder. Its volume is massive: in the open it can be heard several hundred metres away. It was designed to be heard on the battlefield before modern artillery existed.

For a funeral on a Manhattan avenue, with traffic and crowds, the Uilleann pipe does not carry. The Great Highland Bagpipe does. The choice was not cultural: it was acoustic.

The 1972 boom

All of the above explains why there were bagpipes at American funerals from the nineteenth century onward. But the image — the automatic association between Amazing Grace and the bagpipes — has a precise date.

In 1972, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment of the British army, recorded Amazing Grace with bagpipes and drums. It was a global hit at a moment when television was distributing images on a massive scale.

Detail	Value
Recording date	10 December 1971
Label	RCA Records
UK chart position	No. 1 for 5 weeks (April 1972)
US chart position	Top 11 on the Billboard Hot 100
Copies sold	More than 7 million worldwide

From that point on, the connection was sealed. Not as a decision, but as cultural sediment: millions of people heard that recording in an emotional context — on the radio, on the family television, in the news — and the association was fixed. Bagpipes had already been playing at American funerals for more than a century. The 1972 record universalised them as the sound of grief.

The ritual as emotional architecture

The current protocol of the bagpipe funeral is not arbitrary. It has a structure that does something concrete with time and space.

The piper begins to play from a distance, alone, before the ceremony begins. You hear them from afar without seeing them. Then the pipe band joins: more bodies, more presence, the living and the community surrounding the dead. At the end, the piper walks away playing, alone again, until the music fades into the distance.

Entry of the soul, presence of the living, departure. There is no need to explain it because the music already does.

That architecture — the sound that arrives from far away, that envelops, that recedes — is something the bagpipes can do that few instruments can replicate at the same physical scale. It is not metaphor. It is acoustics applied to ritual.

What I recognise from here

I play at funerals. Not many, but I do. And what that American ritual describes — the solitary piper, the distance, the sound that fades — feels familiar to me not because I copied it, but because it responds to the same logic.

The Asturian gaita also has a repertoire for the dead. The processional march is not the same piece as Amazing Grace, and the context is not the same, but the function is identical: to create a suspended time in which grief can exist without anyone having to explain anything. Just as the alborada opens a romería or a wedding, the march accompanies the dead. They are the two faces of the same trade, and both demand the same thing: do it truly or do not do it at all.

I wrote about this in another way when I spoke of Fervienza, the piece I composed to join those who are here with those who are gone: the bagpipe as a tool for naming what cannot be said any other way. I tell that story in Writing new music from tradition.

The Celtic tradition and the Asturian one never met in America. But the wind instrument doing what it has always done — accompanying the dead, giving sound to grief — is the same impulse on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Sources

On Celtic immigration and the emergency services:

• Johnson, K. (2019). The Evolution of Firefighter Funeral Ritual. Undergraduate Research Journal, University of Nebraska at Kearney — analyses how Irish and Scottish immigrants introduced the Highland bagpipe as the cornerstone of corporate funeral rituals.
• Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish Became White. Routledge — a reference work on the social and labour discrimination against Celtic immigrants in the nineteenth century and their entry into police and fire departments.

On the acoustic difference between bagpipes:

• Eastern United States Pipe Band Association (EUSPBA) and historical manuals from the Emerald Societies — document the technical difference between the Uilleann pipe (bellows-driven, chamber volume) and the Great Highland Bagpipe (mouth-blown, 100+ dB, designed to march in open field).

On the 1972 hit:

• The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Amazing Grace (RCA Records, 1972) — No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for 5 weeks, top 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, more than 7 million copies sold worldwide.

On the funeral ritual protocol:

• National Fallen Firefighters Foundation (NFFF) and Line of Duty Death protocols from the NYPD and CPD pipe bands — detail the choreography of the solo piper, the final fading, and the symbolic reading of each verse.