Apparently, there was a Scottish regiment there and a ranger told us it was the only time they ever lost a battle, because they weren’t wearing kilts. We marched across the Chalmette Battlefield in bright red uniforms. One bagpipe band I am in used to do reenactments and earlier this year was the 200th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. Tell me more about the connections between bagpipes and war?
At one funeral I did the wife of the deceased came up to me crying and said, “Thank you for piping my husband into heaven.” He told me that according to Celtic tradition the bagpipes were so loud that they let God know a soul was crossing over. At some point I asked an old Scotsman where the idea of playing pipes at funerals came from. I think 9/11 really helped popularize bagpipes as a funeral instrument, and a lot of new police and firefighter bands have come into existence since then. When police brothers passed they wanted bagpipes, and that tradition continued, for police and also firefighters. After the potato famine, a lot of Irish and Scottish came across and ended up taking jobs no one wanted, many became cops. The Celtic tradition has used pipes for hundreds of years, for weddings, funerals, family gatherings but mainly as an instrument of war. What’s the history of the bagpipes, and why are they so popular of late? As a warm late-winter rain fell outside, she discussed deathbed confessions, the brave lone piper of the D-Day invasion and how after Hurricane Katrina many elderly came back to New Orleans to die.
She has also piped hundreds of deceased New Orleanians into the next realm.ĭigital Dying recently sat down with Marta at Satsuma Café in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. She has piped in President Bush and Clinton and been in Rod Stewart’s warmup band three times-he is Scottish. For more than 20 years Marta has also had a unique musical side gig, bagpipes.
Marta’s “day job” is in hospice, she positions her battery-operated keyboard at the bedsides of folks many people have written off then dives into a solo performance that can literally bring the dead back to life, at least for a few moments. New Orleans is a small town, everyone has their favorite local cobbler or po-boy shop and when it comes to funeral bagpipes the go-to woman is a music therapist named Marta Vincent. Marta Vincent has played bagpipes at hundreds of funerals, in New Orleans and also small country towns in nearby Cajun Country.
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