River Road Farm Wedding in Manchester, VT

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

Preprations for Maggie & Jessie's Big Day

Our groundwork for the wedding began many weeks prior, with Maggie & Jessie offering a myriad of musical and logistical options with us for the wedding (preparation is a key part of our process). Maggie & Jessie were incredibly helpful during this advanced planning and super helpful throughout.

Once the wedding 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. We're often asked about our process for loading in and sound checking at various venues. 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

Part of our groundwork involves outlining exactly what portions of the wedding East Coast Soul will be involved with. For this wedding in particular, Maggie & Jessie were also interested in 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 often the case, East Coast Soul was asked to provide cocktail hour music. Cocktail hour is a great opportunity for the bride and groom to relax after the heightened emotions of the ceremony. We do our part 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, East Coast Soul is asked to provide 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 bride and groom’s First Dance

With no introductions to take care of, we moved into into the bride and groom’s first dance.

The groom and bride's first dance is almost always one of the most meaningful parts of the wedding. It's an opportunity for the bride and groom to take a moment for themselves. For this particular performance, we were requested to perform the first dance tune live, as opposed to playing it from a recording. With this part of the evening complete, 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 a majority of weddings, we are also asked to perform the couple's parent dances. The parents dances were an opportunity for the to join Maggie & Jessie to spend a couple minutes in the center of the floor with their parents. For this particular performance, the bride and her father danced together. Jessie and his mother danced together as well. Parent dances are a great way to kick off the dance party 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

our performances often start with older material. We've discovered this is an excellent approach to get everyone up on the dance floor with songs they know and love. Artists like Marvin Gaye, Sam and Dave, The Temptations, and more dominated the beginning of our set list. We then moved into playing tunes 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!