Wedding season is upon us again, so I thought I’d take another run at filling out the music4dance.net wedding dance catalog with wedding spotlight songs cross-referenced by partner/ballroom dance style. It’s pretty common to choreograph a first dance, and I’ve seen mothers and fathers learn a particular style of dance so they could lead/follow their offspring in a partner dance, especially among friends who are part of a social dance or ballroom community.

Cross-referencing between a tag and a dance style is something that the music4dance database is set up to handle exceptionally well. But, of course, someone has to add the tags and vote on the dances. I recently did a round of collecting information from Spotify playlists, but that is never as good as community members contributing their ideas. Please consider adding your own first dance or other wedding spotlight songs to the database.

On that note, I’m seeing more and more different wedding spotlight dances (for lack of a better term). I mentioned Mother/Daughter the last time I looked at wedding dances, but now I’m also seeing Father/Son, Brother/Sister, and Last Dance, just to name a few. This pattern has me thinking about the most helpful format for the wedding dance page. I like the simple table format because I can get a quick idea of the distribution of different dance styles of songs in the database compared to the spotlight event, but that probably isn’t the best way to look at the data from the perspective of someone looking for a song to dance to and gets worse if I add more columns.  I’m leaning towards another generalization of the Holiday page. The top-level page would be linked to each of the spotlight dances (First Dance, Mother/Son, etc.), and then each of those pages would look like the holiday page with a list of all songs that suit the event and links to drill down to a particular style of dance.

I don’t think I should be adding wedding songs like processionals, recessionals, etc., because I’m pretty sure people don’t dance partner dances to those. But as I type this, I can’t shake the thought of a father and daughter Viennese Waltzing down the aisle to Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway.” I’m also not ready to tackle the line dances that are often done during the reception, as there are sites that specialize in line dances, and from what I can tell, the set of these dances that are used at wedding receptions is small enough that it doesn’t require a database to keep track of them.

But are there other spotlight dances that we should be tagging? Can you think of different ways to organize the catalog? If you have ideas about this post or the site, comment below or use other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. Since I don’t have a great way of tracking historical song counts, I will note here that as of this writing, there are 1771 songs tagged as Wedding and have at least one dance vote, of which 1131 are tagged as First Dance.