River Road Farm Wedding in Manchester, VT

East Coast Soul was blessed to be brought to join Maggie & Jessie for their stunning River Road Farm Wedding in .

Preprations for Maggie & Jessie's Big Day

Our preparations for the wedding day began well ahead, with Maggie & Jessie expressing a variety of musical and logistical preferences with us for the wedding day (we always leave an excess of time for preparation). Maggie & Jessie were incredibly helpful during this advanced planning and super helpful throughout.

Once the wedding day arrived, East Coast Soul traveled to and moved swiftly through our standard load-in, set up, and sound check process for River Road Farm weddings. Our process for loading in and setting up at any given venue is a big part of our preparation process. This is a part of the day that we take seriously, spending extra time to avoid rushing, and ensuring our gear is properly tuned for the room.

Ceremony

One aspect of our preparations involves outlining exactly what portions of the wedding day East Coast Soul will be involved with. For this wedding in particular, Maggie & Jessie were also looking for East Coast Soul to help out for their ceremony. Maggie & Jessie 's ceremony . East Coast Soul prepared a a Solo Piano performance and Single Mic for speeches. Following East Coast Soul performing roughly 30 minutes of “prelude” music as guests arrived, the ceremony took place.

Cocktail Hour

As is common, East Coast Soul was requested to perform cocktail hour music. Cocktail hour is a wonderful chance for the bride and groom to unwind after the intense emotions of the ceremony. We contribute by performing a blend of relaxed music for guests to listend to. In this case, We provided a Playback and and featured music by artists such as John Coltrane, Miles Davies, and more.

Reception

In a bulk of weddings, we is asked to take care of MC services for the formal portions of the celebrations. This River Road Farm Wedding was no different. However, there were actually no formal intros for this wedding.

The couple’s First Dance

With no introductions to take care of, we changed gears to into the couple’s first dance.

The newly married couple's first dance is almost always one of the most emotional parts of the wedding day. It's an opportunity for the bride and groom to take a moment for themselves. For this particular wedding, we were requested to play the first dance number live, instead of playing it from a recording. With this portion of the wedding finished, the guests and vendors took a break for dinner. After as short a break as possible, East Coast Soul's Atlantic ensemble returned to the stage.

Parent Dances

In many weddings, we are also asked to perform the couple's parent dances. This was a chance for the to join Maggie & Jessie to spend a couple minutes in the middle of the dancefloor with their father and mother. For this particular wedding, the bride and her father shared a dance. Jessie and his mother shared a dance as well. Parent dances are a fantastic way to kick off the performance portion of the evening. We often ask guests to join the couple and their parents on the dance floor, and then move directly in to the rest of the performance.

Dance Party

East Coast Soul performances often start with older material. We've discovered this is an excellent approach to get everyone relaxed and dancing with songs they know and love. Artists like Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Earth Wind & Fire, and more dominated the outset of our performance. We then moved into performing music by artists like Whitney Houston, Prince, Michael Jackson and more. Finally, we ended the night performing contemporary material that everyone could sing along with.

Guests danced non-stop from beginning to end, and we limited our breaks to ensure people had as much time to dance as possible.

Thanks so much to Maggie & Jessie for having us at their beautiful June wedding at River Road Farm! And thank you to Undressed Moments for sharing these beautiful photos with us!