This lady? Is the late, great Etta James whose most famous hit, At Last, has become to modern wedding processionals what Pachelbel’s Canon in D was to the same part of the wedding in the seventies and eighties. Miss James, who died last week, lived long enough to see her song become a wedding classic.

Every decade or two, a new tune becomes the It Tune for wedding processionals. Let’s face it, even Wagner’s famous wedding march had to start off as a newfangled and slightly scandalous choice on someone’s part. Now it’s so traditional that an approximately equal number of couples would never dream of anything else, or would never dream of using it. For the record, I fall into the latter category. I don’t care much for Wagner overall, and I really dislike the idea of using a piece of music from such a disastrous marriage as a way to start off a new one.

And after I’d been to roughly sixty bazillion weddings where the Canon in D was played as the processional, I went right off Pachelbel, too. I still, however, have fond memories of the wedding I attended where the bride was a member of a string quartet who gave her the gift of playing her wedding gratis. They brought in a replacement violinist, and did Pachelbel proud. It was a charming choice between the musicians in question and the intimate backyard setting.

I, however, have never belonged to a string quartet, and the brief period in which I attempted reluctantly – and entirely without a natural talent for it – to learn the violin is an episode best never mentioned again.

So when it came time to plan my own wedding, I needed something different. Oh, also, I was being lead up the aisle by a bagpiper, and frankly, none of the tunes I’d heard other brides use was going to sound right on the pipes other than the theme from Star Wars… which my piper would have flat out refused to play.

In the end, my piper suggested a traditional Scottish tune called Highland Wedding, which was pretty, joyful, and composed with pipes in mind. It was perfect. We recessed to another traditional Scottish tune, Mairie’s Wedding. That one was my suggestion. Those choices still make me delighted. Neither was overdone in my set, but both were written to celebrate weddings and traditional in one of my background cultures. I loved the tunes, the musicians in question knew them well, and the guests seemed to enjoy both selections.

What about you? What would your perfect processional/recessional tunes be? Something traditional or not? Something played on a harp or a kazoo?

Tell me all about it!

Oh my little chickadees! Did I attend a great wedding yesterday or what?

This was a perfect pairing. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is an unbeatable combination when it comes to planning a fabulous wedding to be remembered for years to come: a chef and a musician.

Mr. Twistie and I met Bryan about five years ago when Mr. Twistie joined a band Bryan plays in. We both immediately liked him. He’s quiet and mellow with a wickedly sly sense of humor. In fact, he’s so quiet we didn’t start hearing about Julie for a long, long time even though they were already getting together back then.
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If you’d asked me a week ago why it’s important to vet your wedding DJ, I don’t think that “So he doesn’t boobie slap someone at the reception” wouldn’t have been on my list of answers. Now it will be, forevermore, even if the chances that your wedding DJ will play the boobongos there on the platform are pretty slim overall. Apparently, the following video – a clip from a Daytona Beach wedding from May of this year – has made the rounds in a big way, but in case you haven’t seen it, no, it’s not some viral marketing ploy. It’s the real deal.

The boobongo virtuoso you see before you is Fast Eddie, owner or perhaps manager of a Florida upholstery shop by day and wedding DJ by night. After watching the video, I had to know more – who is this guy? Luckily, the good folks at urlesque scooped the story. Can you believe that poor Fast Eddie didn’t get paid? I kid, I kid! But I also know some people who would be angry as h-e-doublehockeysticks on the inside when they saw this but would nonetheless pay their less-than-stellar boobie slappin’ wedding vendor the balance owed.

If you’re cringing right now, I feel your pain… videos of wedding vendors like this made me hyperventilate when I was planning my wedding. But never fear! We here at Manolo for the Brides have got you covered with tips for planning a wedding safely, knowing what to expect when hiring wedding vendors, and dealing with tricksy wedding vendors. Heed our advice and you’ll more often than not be in the clear!

That said, here’s a palate cleanser in the form of a grainy video of an iguana eating some poor couple’s wedding cake:

Choosing not to listen to lyrics when choosing wedding reception music is a dangerous game in this humble blogger’s opinion. And it seems a lot of folks agree with me. All Things Considered recently asked its listeners and commenters to send in stories about the worst choices for wedding songs they’ve ever encountered and then chose the worst five. The least appropriate wedding songs were:

Send in the Clowns (as sung by Judy Collins) is a ballad from Act II of A Little Night Music. In it, the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life. Uplifting!

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So there I am laughing at the New York Times for jumping on the DIY wedding music bandwagon so late — it’s 2009, jeez, and even I had an “iPod wedding” — when I decided to search this blog to see what I or my counterpart had written about it. As it turns out, a whole lot of nothing. The closest I came to writing about DIY wedding music was a post about how to organize a wedding playlist in which I totally spaced on replying to a commenter who asked me to share some of my own wedding playlist. Sorry, Nadia!

To make sure we don’t have any massively jarring gaps here at Manolo for the Brides, I’m going to excerpt some of iDo, since I spend a number of pages in Chapter 14 discussing DIY wedding music and it’s Friday and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. Note: More and more people are calling this the iPod wedding, though you can DIY your wedding music with any mp3 player or a laptop.

Search for “iPod wedding” and you’ll come across hundreds of DJs on the warpath. The moment a bride-to-be brings up her choice to ditch the traditional disk jockey in favor of some digital alternative, pro DJs start weighing in. It’s a bad idea, they say. You can’t anticipate what people will want to listen to or read the energy of the room like a real live DJ. Guests will mess around with your playlist when you’re not looking, and the rented sound system will fall over and injure someone who will then slap you with a hefty lawsuit. Your wedding will be an colossal failure!

But there’s really no reason for professional entertainers to get so defensive, because no one is trying to permanently replace DJs and bands with iTunes playlists. The fact is that some people can’t afford either or would rather budget money elsewhere, some people have tastes that are way too eclectic, and some people just don’t care overmuch for the two standard options.

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I wanted to play music I liked at my wedding, which meant no Electric Slide, no YMCA, and no call and response numbers. Consequently, The Beard and I opted to laptop DJ our own wedding. We had the equipment we needed, and we had somewhere to plug the whole setup in. After setting up a playlist, all that was left to do was listen to every single song to make sure every single one was family friendly.

You would not believe how many were crossed off the list because of cussin’ or unabashed adult themes. Songs I thought were squeaky clean turned out to be surprisingly raunchy when I listened to them with a critical ear! In the end, I think that ‘pee’ (in Spider Robinson’s Belaboring the Obvious) was the naughtiest word sung over our sound system.

Photo via The Consumerist

But one person’s inappropriate is another person’s A-OK. I was born into a very churchy, upstanding, “say-gosh-not-God” kind of family, meaning that even songs containing certain widely accepted euphemisms for sex or drugs were right off the table. On the other hand, Conor Friedersdorf of Culture11 recently examined how gangsta rap is making musical inroads at wedding receptions.

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What’s more fun than folding laundry and only slightly less fun than attending one’s own wedding? Watching other people’s wedding videos, of course! Thank goodness everyone and their sister now posts their reception vids to YouTube so we can all gawk at all the crazy antics perpetrated by drunken relatives, cranky kiddies, and the even–or should I say especially–the bride and groom.

How else would those of us who went the traditional route and learned to fox trot know that it’s all right to do a Hammer Time first dance duet instead of the boring old seventh-grade shuffle?

Some of the kooky couples who ditched All I Ask of You for something funkier have gotten flack from critics who say a first dance should not be a performance. To that I say an impassioned, “Whateverrrrrrr.” I’m just jealous that I couldn’t convince The Beard to go all out and let me come up with a wicked complex song and dance number!

If you’re keen to take your first dance to the next level, watch the videos below and take notes.

Surprise everyone:

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