The old world is back.  Fall weddings days in the Blue Ridge are blasts from the past. Elderly gentlemen are requesting the Cupid Shuffle.  A bride is marching up a hill atop the Misty Mountains, at 12 Ridges Vineyard, to the music of Hobbbits and wizards in Middle Earth.

This Autumn, couples persevering through a pandemic are finally celebrating the wedding of their dreams.

Even young couples can be old souls.  Old, new, borrowed and blue tunes are the sound of wedding plans resurrected.

Of course today’s music beats at the heart of a modern wedding. Requests for next year’s celebrations aren’t yet recorded. Meantime, the sweet, soulful sounds of the Seventies are back in vogue, bringing people together on the dance floor with “Ya’lls” and yowls and swelling horns, that four on the floor drum beat and Old World charm. 

People thrilled to be together again sing on the dance floor, gyrating with delight, remembering every word.

From the Barns of Madison to the barn at Turkey Ridge, and chandeliered ballrooms all around Charlottesville, good old tunes blend joyfully into the hip happening hits.

Now we have Classic Hip Hop, sampling the sounds of Motown, Eighties funk, the rhythmic dalliances of the Nineties and the hopes and desires of the early Aughts.  The Cupid Shuffle will get these young folks going, an old guy says.          

The bride marching up to a Middle Earth mountaintop is a graduate of the police academy, joining her husband the military man on top of the world.  At last they hit the dance floor at 12 Ridges Vineyard, jamming to the tunes that inspire everyone they know, swaying together to “Closing Time.”

The music that always brought us together can bring us back to where we want to be, celebrating a couple eternally in love.

If not for Cotton Eyed Joe, and a vicious virus, these newlyweds would have been married a long time ago.