What makes a love song become a wedding song?
For one family, the answer stretches across generations.
Paul’s parents chose Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly’s “True Love.” Years later, Paul and Kelly stepped onto the reception dance floor—after a few precautionary dance lessons—to Steven Curtis Chapman’s “I Will Be Here.”
Between them are two remarkable songs with stories of their own. Noel Paul Stookey’s “Wedding Song (There Is Love)” was written for a wedding and became an enduring expression of love as something larger than ourselves. And the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” had the most unlikely beginning of all: a Crocker Bank commercial about newlyweds starting their life together.
There’s also a winter night at the Holiday Star Theatre in Merrillville, Indiana. Mary Travers’ flight was cancelled, leaving Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey to perform without her. They told the audience they knew the songs so well they would hear Mary’s missing harmony in their heads.
They did.
And that night, Stookey made an exception and performed a song he had stopped regularly singing in concert: “Wedding Song.”
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we follow four songs through courtship, weddings, memory and married life:
“True Love” — love discovered.
“There Is Love” — love made sacred.
“We’ve Only Just Begun” — a life beginning.
“I Will Be Here” — the promise to remain.
Because perhaps the most important word in a wedding song isn’t love.
It’s will.
Not simply I love you.
I will be here.
