The coronavirus couldn’t stop Jon Pardi and Summer Duncan from saying “I do” on Saturday evening during an intimate wedding at Tennessee’s Saddle Woods Farm, Billboard can confirm.
The 35-year-old country singer-songwriter and the 31-year-old hairstylist originally planned an “unreal” Memorial Day wedding in Montana before the pandemic delayed their special day.
“We had an entire lodge rented out for three days for a wedding weekend extravaganza with events daily, a spa, chefs… But then COVID hit, and that all went away,” Duncan told People on Sunday, the day after their wedding. “With the sudden postponement — and Jon still having a full tour schedule — we were very limited with available dates.”
But the two safely coordinated “Pardi Time” — as the message read on guests’ custom face masks — for their wedding in Murfreesboro, Tenn. Each guest was tested for COVID-19 prior to the ceremony and sat at spaced-apart tables with sanitation stations at the reception, which were both held primarily in a heated flex indoor/outdoor space to maximize ventilation, People reports.
“We had a friend who was married at Saddle Woods last year, and when we walked into their wedding, Jon was like, ‘This is the most amazing wedding and venue ever,’” she said in the People interview. “So when we had to cancel our destination wedding, they were naturally the first venue we called when we knew we had to keep things closer to home. There’s never a right time in 2020 to get married, so after all the planning and replanning we were just happy we got to do it.”
Pardi’s longtime friend and stylist John Murphy married the couple, while his father and tour manager, Trey Wilson, were his groomsmen. Duncan enlisted her two best friends from California and Nashville to be her bridesmaids. And the CMA Award-winning artist picked his unreleased track “Look at You” to soundtrack their first dance as a married couple, which he wrote for Duncan in June and recorded earlier this month.
Pardi and Duncan got engaged during his concert at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium in October 2019. Dierks Bentley captured the couple’s sweet onstage moment on his Instagram, writing, “@jonpardipics crushing the @theryman stage and crushing life… so proud of you pal.” They had been dating for three-and-a-half years.
See Duncan’s pictures from the “best day of my life” here.
