Last night our band played historical music.

We were in a small theater. I played fife. The snare played military cadences. My friend and boyhood idol, Bobby Horton, was beside me. He was dazzling the crowd by playing all the music he recorded for the Ken Burns documentaries.

We selected songs from the American Revolution. “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Irishman’s Epistle.”

The lyrics were antiquated. The melodies, ancient. But the meaning came through.

These were songs colonist soldiers would have played during the heat of battle. The tunes the fife and drummer would have been playing as their brothers were falling.

I told stories between songs. Stories from history. Tales you might have heard in Valley Forge, and Lexington, or Fort Ticonderoga. Then we all sang melodies you would have heard in colonial taverns. In colonist living rooms.

I was having fun on that stage, yes. But meanwhile, deep inside, I was feeling something. Something I have never felt before.

It was a deep-in-the-bone feeling. A sensation in my gut that swept over me. Like warm water.

The feeling was connectedness. With people I’ve never met. With colonists. With my ancestors. Whose names I don’t know. Whose biographies were never written.

I felt kinship with bygone farmers, coopers, woodrights, cabinetmakers, brickmakers, tailors, bookbinders, joiners, and millers who came before me. Men and women and children, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the madness of King George.

Thirteen colonies who should not have had a chance in hell at winning a war waged against the greatest military in the world.

And for a few moments, I was sort of on that battlefield. I was one of the teenagers, marching into a hornet’s nest, alongside my fellow villagers.

I was standing alongside ghosts. Minute men. Common men. And I could see that these people were not fables. They were REAL.

They were humans. Like you and me. Dads and grandfathers with soft bellies. Men who on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, jogged laps around local pastures, carrying muskets, to keep in shape for battle.

I looked to my right and my left, and I was no longer on a stage. I was there, in Concord. On Bunker Hill. In Yorktown. My ancestors were beside me. Ragtag soldiers, who weren’t soldiers at all. Just people.

Husbands and sons. Carpenters and clergymen. Some rich, some poor. Some carrying the nicest firelocks money could buy. Some wielding nothing more than a pitchfork.

I was playing my fife for them. As they momentarily stepped out of life everlasting and into reality. I was there. In my spirit. In my heart. Believing wholeheartedly in what they believed in. Believing in what they fought to create. I believe in what they died for.

And I pray I always will.