When my sister was married this past weekend, I fulfilled her request to perform an original composition at the ceremony. Partly because the song I wrote had some of the colloquial simplicity of a country song I got to thinking a lot about my favorite country wedding songs. There is, of course, Gram Parsons’s “$1000 Wedding,” an affecting tale of abandonment at the altar. There is also Kitty Wells’s “I Gave My Wedding Dress Away,” an even harder hitting number about a woman who loses her groom to her sister. My favorite country wedding, however, actually takes place–and it does so inside Hank Snow’s two and a half minute “Marriage Vow.” The lyric is full of simple lines like “will you protect her and honor her name?” and “I whispered I do and I’d do it again,” and Snow’s nasal croon sounds quietly determined. Combine that with a tasteful fiddle introduction, plaintive guitar strums and gorgeous Hawaiian-style steel guitar and you’ve got a classic country ballad.
Along with Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, Snow was one of the great original honky tonk singers. Despite hailing from a conspicuously atypical hometown for a country singer, Nova Scotia, Canada, Snow recorded many country hits in the early 50s. Perhaps his most significant role in popular music history was not as a singer, however, but as a man who helped shape the formative years of Elvis Presley’s music career. Initially Snow affected Elvis by securing for him a spot at the Grand Ole Opry. Not long after that, however, he inadvertently set in motion Elvis’s shift away from country music and toward massive crossover success by introducing him to a then unknown booking agent: Colonel Tom Parker.
Mustn’t forget: Patsy Cline- I Cried All the Way to the Altar
I can never tell if she’s the jilter or the jiltee in this one.
I fall to pieces for Jackso.”