My new favourite blog, Stuff Christians Like, had this post a few days ago: Stuff Christians Like: #161. Refusing to make songs you can slow dance to.
In the comments, several people riff on the theme of (un)suitable music for first dances at weddings. Debbie and I only had a wedding reception with food. We’re both allergic to dancing, but not to food. We were more – ahem – creative with our choice of entry music and exit music for the wedding service itself. For the bulk of the ceremony, we were trad. Hymns included ‘Be thou my vision’ and ‘And can it be’. I’m sure there was a third, but I can’t remember it.
But as I say, the entry and exit music were not quite what you would expect at a Christian wedding. Debbie, having been a biker in her youth, wanted to walk down the aisle with her Dad to Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be wild’ (that’s from the hippie biker film ‘Easy Rider’, young people). We had timed it at the rehearsal so that she would arrive by my side just as the chorus came in for the first time. My mother was in the row behind me. As we stood for the entrance of the bride, she poked me and said, ‘What is this song, darling?’ Our Chair of District also came to the service. As an accomplished classical musician, I have no idea what he thought of the choice.
But I had the choice of exit music. I brought two possibles, and we experimented to see which one had the better rhythm for walking out to. In the end, the theme tune to the 1960s TV show Thunderbirds won out over The Simpsons main theme. We hadn’t told my two young nephews, who were page boys. They were delighted.
As a minister, then, I have little room for argument when couples don’t come up with the usual Mendelssohn and Wagner requests (or Widor’s Toccata, but that depends on the organist’s competence). Perhaps my favourite memory was an African-Caribbean wedding in Chatham. The bride came in, not only with her father and bridesmaids, but a whole long procession, American-style. As a song by Eric Benet played, they danced down the aisle, their forerunners scattering petals. When she left with her new husband, they went out to live African drums.
The one shame about that wedding was that the bride had, as a young woman in Wolverhampton, been a babysitter for Beverley Knight, now a famous British soul singer. Ms Knight was supposed to turn up at the wedding and sing. Unfortunately, recording commitments (she was recording her ‘Who I Am’ CD at the time) prevented her. Instead, an anonymous female singer from a black-majority Pentecostal church sang an a capella solo of Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ (and – yes – Al Green, not Tina Turner). On the spur of the moment I dropped my standard wedding sermon and somehow linked that song with the Bible passage from Ruth that the couple had chosen for the ceremony.
Big Circumstance 
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