A boogie-woogie band livens up your wedding celebration.

You may well be planning to hire a DJ to round off your wedding celebration, but there’s nothing quite like a performance from a live band to really get the party swinging, and nothing to beat a spot of good old-fashioned boogie-woogie and rock’n’roll to get everyone up on the dancefloor.

Bass, drums and honky-tonk piano carve out the blues-based outline, driving the insistent shuffle-beat rhythm irresistibly along with guitar adding tasty riffs and chops above, while a feisty horn section punctuates the vocal delivery with frenetic barks and squeals. Instrumental solos spotlight trumpet, guitar, piano and saxophone in turn, adding dramatic and textural variety to the effect.

Blues, Rockabilly, Jump-Jive, R’n’B, Rock’n’Roll Classics

Find out more about booking a boogie woogie band such as Big Al’s Hoodoo Kings.

The dance-crazes of the swing era took on new forms in postwar America, with jump-jive swiftly superseded by rock’n’roll in the mid-’50s. The music moved on, too, with the highly-arranged dance-orchestras of the Glenn Miller-style Big Band giving way to a more urgent, looser, less swing-driven rhythmic delivery.

A new generation of young, more compact guitar-led units produced the novel rockabilly and skiffle styles, consciously harking back to the authentic raw energy of earlier blues but simultaneously, inexorably, leading to rock’n’roll and the birth of the modern pop phenomenon. Boogie-woogie music with its concomitant dance-styles sits astride this brief yet transformative cultural period.

Boogie-Woogie is an ideal form of musical entertainment for a wedding reception party for the simple reason that it unites several generations – those fortunate enough to have personally witnessed the original phenomenon at first hand as it happened, right down to the youngsters who have been introduced to it through revivalists such as Jools Holland and Jamie Cullum.

Boogie-woogie is perfect for a ‘Retro’ American theme

Think iconic ’50s America – think early Elvis, chrome-encrusted Cadillacs, Marvel comics, Marilyn Monroe; think hamburgers, hot dogs, milkshakes and bottled cola (not cans!); think T-shirts, narrow jeans and bomber jackets; bobbysox, flared skirts and ponytails. Easy enough to achieve as a look, just as easy to summon up the spirit of the age with a careful choice of live musical entertainment – boogie-woogie, of course!

Boogie-Woogie is alive and kicking

Like rock’n’roll, boogie-woogie music is great fun to play on account of its raw youthful energy, and consequently there are a number of really good bands to be found all across the UK available to perform at weddings and other celebrations.

So, if you’re looking for a style of live musical entertainment at your wedding celebration party that can deliver non-stop Rockabilly, R’n’B and Rock’n’Roll classics to a pulsating dancefloor, then an energetic Boogie-Woogie band may well be right up your street. Evoking a more innocent bygone age, this superb vintage dance-music has much to offer feet of all ages!