River Road Farm Wedding in Manchester, VT

East Coast Soul was grateful to be invited to join Maggie & Jessie for their stunning River Road Farm Wedding in Manchester, VT.

Preprations for Maggie & Jessie's Big Day

Our groundwork for the wedding day began well ahead, with Maggie & Jessie offering a myriad of musical and logistical options 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 a huge asset throughout.

Once the wedding day arrived, East Coast Soul traveled to Manchester, VT and began our standard load-in and sound check 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 day 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 providing 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 great opportunity for the bride and groom to unwind after the intense emotions of the ceremony. We do our part by providing a variety of relaxed music for guests to listend to. In this case, We provided a Playback and and featured music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and more.

Reception

In a majority of weddings, we is asked to take care of MC services for the formal portions of the receptions. 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 headed into into the bride and groom’s first dance.

The newly married couple's first dance is consistently 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 specific wedding, we were asked to perform the first dance song live, as opposed to performing it from a recording. With this portion of the evening complete, the guests and vendors took a break for dinner. After a super brief break, 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 mother and father. For this specific wedding, the bride and her father danced together. Jessie and his mother danced together as well. Parent dances are an amazing way to kick off the main dance performance. 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 relaxed and dancing with songs they're familiar with. Artists like Sam and Dave, 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!