A Brief History of the Onstage Wedding

There’s been endless speculation about where and when Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding will take place, but fans finally have a few more clues about the most anticipated ceremony of the year: The New York Times reported earlier this week that the couple have rented out Madison Square Garden for a multiday bash over July 4 weekend. According to sources, they’re planning a gathering for about 100 people on July 2, and then a bigger celebration of about 1,000 guests likely in the arena, which has a “banquet capacity” of roughly 1,250 attendees, or the MSG theater, which can hold about 5,500.

Though the couple hasn’t confirmed reports, MSG appears to solve a logistical quagmire more than anything. The arena is known for being extremely secure, with no windows and plenty of back entrances and underground tunnels that allow mega-watt celebrities to go in and out unseen. (The Times reported that a permit was filed to shut down the streets surrounding the space from July 2 through midday July 4, and Amtrak police officers were told to expect a gigantic event.) The venue offers the soon-to-be newlyweds privacy, space, and star power, all in one.

But there’s also precedent here. It’s not the first time MSG has been the site of one of pop culture’s buzziest weddings: Back in 1974, Sly Stone decided to marry his girlfriend, model Kathy Silva, during one of his concerts at the storied venue in front of about 20,000 people. Stone and Silva had just had a baby, and in his 2023 memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), the soul legend recalled how the idea of getting married at MSG came up while he was on the phone with his A&R director Steve Paley. “I could do a gig, get paid, and get married at the same time.… We set the date for June 5, a Wednesday. We’d have a ceremony just before the concert, right there on the stage. Then a concert, then a party afterward at the rooftop lounge of the Waldorf Astoria. Steve wanted everyone to wear gold to keep the shine high. Invitations went out,” he wrote.

All of the planning took place quickly: Japanese and soul food, “New York” champagne, a round cake with a gold record on top, and matching gold outfits from Halston’s for the bride and groom. Stone rehearsed a wedding-march-style song with his band, Eddie Kendricks was the opener, and Stone’s mother and niece made speeches. Then models came out in gold, followed by the bride, and then came Stone in sunglasses. They got married before screaming fans, and the celebration continued late into the night. “Years later I saw a picture of a ticket someone kept: $8.50 for a wedding and a concert both,” Stone recalled in his memoir. “A bargain.”

Stone, of course, wasn’t the first artist to master the art of the onstage wedding. In fact, he may have taken a page out of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s playbook. She pulled off a similar public extravaganza when she married Russell Morrison, who would become her manager, before a gigantic, 25,000-person crowd at Washington, D.C.’s Griffith Stadium. The wedding was positioned as a PR stunt to revamp her career, according to music historian Gayle Wald, and promoters reportedly gave Tharpe one year to find a husband (she’d been married twice before). She chose Morrison, and though it’s unclear how well she knew him at the time, they stayed married until her death. 

The wedding was a full-blown musical spectacle, with backup singers and bridesmaids, plus Tharpe’s own power vocals. She wore an extravagant dress she bought from the department store Thalhimer’s in Virginia. The dress was a form of sweet revenge: In 1948, she had been detained by Thalhimer’s security and police simply for trying to buy a fur coat in cash. Thalimer’s delivered her wedding dress to Griffith Stadium, which has since been demolished, in a private luxury car; the dress was $800, which is about $11,000 today.

A few other celebrity nuptials have doubled as pop-culture moments, even if they’ve been smaller than a stadium wedding. Hank Williams and his second wife, Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar, got married in private in 1952 before staging two sold-out public wedding ceremonies at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium. Lucinda Williams took inspiration from that celebration when she married her manager, Tom Overby, live onstage at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis in 2009. They wed while Williams sang for 1,500 fans, wearing all black. Back in 2022, Jack White pulled double duty by proposing to his then-girlfriend, musician and songwriter Olivia Jean, during a sold-out Supply Chain Issues show at Detroit’s Masonic Temple Theatre — and then marrying her on the spot. White popped the question while performing the White Stripes’ 2001 single “Hotel Yorba” before a sea of excited concertgoers and his parents, who were in the audience. (The couple recently filed for divorce.)

Swift probably won’t have a stadium full of fans, but that hasn’t stopped people from hoping she’ll share as much of the big day as possible. With a massive stage in her grasp, Swifites are also betting on music and some impromptu performances. Whatever it ends up being, they’ll find some way to cheer the couple on when they finally say “I do.”