A fire captain who made sticks and fifes.

The Cooperman company grew out of a fife and drum corps. Its founder, Patrick H. “Pat” Cooperman, learned drums in his elementary-school band in Mount Vernon, New York, the company says, served in the US Navy on an aircraft carrier during the Second World War, and on his return joined the fife and drum corps of his hometown Veterans of Foreign Wars post, the Colonial Greens, as a rudimental snare drummer.

He was a woodworker and furniture maker by trade, and he began by making his own drumsticks. Other corps members asked for sticks; his father-in-law, a fifer in the same corps, and the other fifers encouraged him to try fifes. By the late 1950s, the company says, he was making and selling handmade sticks and fifes across New York and Connecticut from his basement in Mount Vernon, with three men working part-time, while he held a full-time job as a captain in the Mount Vernon fire department. He also took in more and more repairs on rope-tension drums — the tall field drums, tightened by rope, of colonial and Civil War music — and collected ideas for improving them.

Sources differ on the founding date. English Wikipedia’s article on the fife gives 1961; the company’s own history describes the part-time business of the 1950s and dates the incorporated company, Cooperman Fife & Drum Co. Inc., to 1975, when Cooperman began retiring from the fire service and opened a full-time shop in Centerbrook, Connecticut, in the lower Connecticut River Valley. The first set of his Liberty Model rope drums was delivered the same year, the company says, putting his ideas for the instrument into practice.

Rope drums, fifes and the Army Band.

Cooperman’s fifes came out of the Connecticut tradition of the Cloos fife, with changes to improve intonation, Wikipedia says. The company now makes student fifes in plastic and domestic hardwoods as well as its original one-piece fife in exotic woods, and, according to the same article, it took over the manufacture of the McDonagh fife, a ten-hole concert model whose previous makers stopped in 2003. Cooperman had moved into concert fifes in about 1985 with a two-piece fife and an acoustically corrected one-piece version.

The drums carry the most prestige. The rope drums of the United States Army Band, including those of its Herald Trumpets, are made by Cooperman, according to John Beck’s Encyclopedia of Percussion (Routledge, 2013) as cited by Wikipedia; they are painted with an emblem called “the Grand Republic,” designed by Gus Moeller. Cooperman also serves the living-history trade: a 1989 Williamsburg Reproductions catalogue lists it among Colonial Williamsburg’s licensed manufacturers, for musical instruments, and guides for teachers and historical interpreters name it as a source of period instruments, quill pens and 19th-century games.

The range then widened beyond the corps. The company says Pat Cooperman was drawn to the growing popularity of frame drums, and hand drums now make up much of its catalogue: bodhráns, tars and bendirs, and jingled drums such as the riq, daf, dayereh, pandeiro, kanjira and tambourines. Many are signature lines — a Glen Velez series named for the frame-drum player, and an Artist Innovation Series with percussionists including Judy Piazza, Todd Roach and Rowan Storm. It also makes drumsticks and banjo rims.

Hand percussion in context.

The seven brands in this group make the instruments that sit around the drum kit: hand drums, cajóns, frame drums, tambourines, concert percussion and drumheads.

Two are hand-drum makers. LP, or Latin Percussion, was founded in New York in 1964 by Martin Cohen; Drum Workshop bought it from Fender’s Kaman Music business in 2014–15, and Roland bought Drum Workshop in 2022. Tycoon Percussion says it was founded in Bangkok in 1983 by Stephen Yu, a musician from Hong Kong, and that it is family-owned and makes its instruments in its own Thai factory.

Two work mainly in wood. Schlagwerk says it began in 1982, when two carpentry apprentices, Gerhard Priel and Bengt Schumacher, copied a Brazilian slit drum, and that it makes its cajóns at Gingen an der Fils, Germany, though its cajón cymbals are hammered in Turkey. Cooperman says Patrick Cooperman began making drumsticks and fifes in Mount Vernon, New York, in the 1950s, and that it has worked from a former sawmill in Bellows Falls, Vermont, since 2006.

Three make tambourines, concert percussion and drumheads. Rhythm Tech grew from the crescent tambourine of the session drummer Richard Taninbaum, which it says it introduced in 1980; its website calls it a division of JAM USA. Black Swamp Percussion was founded by Eric Sooy in Bowling Green, Ohio, dates itself to 1995 and now works from Zeeland, Michigan, calling its instruments “USA made.” Aquarian, founded in 1980 by Roy Burns and Ron Marquez, has made drumheads since 1987 and is based in Anaheim, California.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A sawmill on the Connecticut River.

The company’s second base was a mill. In 1987, it says, it bought the old sawmill and wood-bending operation of the Maplecraft Manufacturing Company at Bellows Falls, Vermont, on the Connecticut River, and in 2006 it consolidated all its operations there after more than thirty years in Centerbrook. From Maplecraft, it says, its craftsmen learned to choose trees in the local forests for their tone and bending qualities, to saw the logs and to steam-bend the lumber; drumstick turners, drum makers and fife makers trained in Connecticut joined them. Manufacturers’ directories list the business at Bellows Falls, and a 2006 local history places the company in neighbouring North Westminster.

Today it trades as The Cooperman Company, and English Wikipedia says it has stayed under the control of members of the Cooperman family. Like many American instrument makers, it puts its machinery to other work: it says it makes traditional toys, games and inexpensive instruments for museum gift shops — museum-store trade guides of 1991 and 2000 name it as a notable supplier — parts for other music companies’ own-brand instruments, and custom wooden boxes for the gourmet food trade. A 2012 book on lawn games names it as a maker of hoops for hoop trundling. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists an article on its founder by L. P. Farrar, titled “Pat Cooperman: Friend to Fifers and Bastion Against Losing our Martial Music Heritage.”

The brand’s look follows its instruments — steam-bent wood, rope, natural-toned heads and painted shells — rather than any published identity system; we found no published colour or typeface standard.

For a design guide, Cooperman shows a brand built on heritage trades, where the object and its making are the identity. Compare Vic Firth, another New England name in turned-wood drumsticks, and Ludwig, a larger American drum maker. For this guide we use Liberty blue, maple and a colonial red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cooperman’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.