On Saturday afternoon my ace fiddler friend Jaimie Snider and I were hired to play for a very upscale wedding in the countryside north of Toronto. No big deal eh? Both of us have played for hundreds of weddings over our respective musical lives. We didn't know the couple, and the guests (for the most part) seemed to be members of the Ontario aristocracy (around here that means Scots background and racehorse affiliations).
What made this a memorable gig for me was the reaction of the guests, as Jaimie and I wandered around the grounds with our Scots, Irish, and Cape Breton tunes. Matrons and High Rollers alike, would hear the fiddle and guitar and turn around with grins on their faces, looking like they'd love to start dancing right there. Some did! The minister - who told us that he was from a small town near Carrickfergus(!) was ready to run to his car and get his melodian. Decorum prevailed, and he contented himself with humming along and getting a bit misty-eyed when I sang a couple of songs from his home turf.

Jaimie is a bit more knowlegable about certain wedding protocols than I am, and when we played a couple of requested airs at specific times during the ceremony, I watched a couple of older people nod knowingly, as if to say "yup, those are the "right" tunes". Quite a number of spectacularly attractive and expensively turned out young (and not so young) women flirted outrageously with us, and I couldn't help but think of the various "rich girl falls in love with Gypsy" ballads. Naturally, when the fiddling stops, these women know that Gypsies can't afford BMWs, so the flirtations are totally harmless.

Later in the evening they'd be listening to a DJ (probably trying to appease both kids and old-farts) but for a few hours they seemed captivated by the old music, played without amplification with only the birds and the bugs as percussion.

Good luck to the couple. I think they started off in a good way.

Rick