JAM Duo provide music for around 150-200 weddings a year on average and each year we like to look back and see what music choices are the most popular. This post is going to look at the song choices our brides have made for their bridal entrance.
The entrance of the bride is of course the highlight of any wedding and musically speaking also the most important moment. Critical to this therefore is the song choice for the brides walk down the aisle.
Based on the weddings we were involved with in 2024 the top three music choices for songs Brides walked down the aisle to are as follows.
In third place for the most popular bridal entrance song was:
Can’t Help Falling in Love (Elvis Presley)
Whilst this song will be forever associated with Elvis Presley, the melody is in fact based on “Plaisir d’amour”,a popular French love song composed in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. The song was initially written from the perspective of a woman and titled “Can’t Help Falling in Love with Him”, which explains the first and third line ending on “in” and “sin” rather than words rhyming with “you”.
Elvis Presley’s version of the song topped the British charts in 1962, spending four weeks at no. 1. It is a testament to the quality of the song that more than 60 years later and it is still the third most popular choice with brides of 2024 for their bridal entrance.
In second place for choice of song during the bridal entrance was:
A Thousand Years (Christina Perri)
The song A Thousand Years by Christina Perri was released in 2011 as a digital download. It was then re recorded in 2012 for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. The song was written about the love affair between Edward and Bella in the novel and subsequent film series.
Despite its popularity at weddings, the song A Thousand Years never made it to the top of the UK chart, peaking at number 11 in 2013.
And finally in first place, the most popular bridal entrance piece as chosen by our brides in 2024 was:
Canon in D – Johann Pachelbel
As wedding traditions evolve, it becomes increasingly common to walk down the aisle to sappy, chart-toppers by Ed Sheeran or wistful acoustic covers of classic rock hits. But Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” a composition that shares elements of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” remains a perennial.
It dates to the late-17th or early 18th century, and there’s speculation that it was written as a gift for the wedding of Johann Sebastian Bach’s older brother, who studied with Pachelbel.
The piece became more popular in the 1970s after French conductor Jean-François Paillard recorded it. It’s been recorded hundreds of times since, and has been featured in films, adverts, and pop songs.
A lot of people define this as the perfect bridal entrance song even with possible religious connections – although to be fair that’s only because Pachelbel wrote a number of religious compositions. There is nothing directly to suggest that Canon in D is a religious song.
You can hear our arrangements of all of these songs and many others by heading over to our listen page.
In Summary
We realise there are a lot of websites which will tell you what the most popular bridal entrance songs are. And indeed, our survey is only from a relatively small pool of around 200 brides based on the weddings we played for during 2024. However what is interesting is that these three songs were not just the most popular but they were ranked first, second and third, by quite a margin.
It would almost be impossible to do more than a top three in this short analysis because apart from these three songs there was no other stand out song or piece of music. Everything else was chosen maybe a few times at most. As a result we felt it was clearly worth writing about these three songs above all the others and made more sense therefore to do a top three rather than top five or even ten.
