The DJ said the words "will the bride and groom please come to the floor," and the room moved.

Every adult in the reception hall knew what was about to happen. The bride knew. The groom knew. The mothers in the back knew. The DJ knew. The first dance song was going to be one of maybe ten options, and the moment it started, the room would settle into the recognition that this was the moment, and the wedding would be, in some real sense, official.

A wedding in the 1970s had a soundtrack that was nearly identical from city to city, state to state. The same songs played at almost every reception. You knew them the moment they started. You may have known every word, because you'd been to seven weddings that summer and heard the same song at six of them.

Here are twelve of them. You'll recognize most.

1. "We've Only Just Begun" -- The Carpenters

The first dance favorite of the decade. Karen Carpenter's voice was gentle enough that the bride wouldn't have to compete with it emotionally, and the lyrics worked for any couple, religious or not. It was the safe pick, and almost everyone picked it.

2. "Color My World" -- Chicago

The other safe pick. Shorter than "We've Only Just Begun," which mattered if the couple was nervous about being on the floor alone. Played from the album track, almost never the live version.

3. "The Anniversary Waltz"

Not the song the bride and groom danced to. The song the long-married couples danced to. The DJ would call out: married twenty-five years, please stay on the floor. Then thirty. Then thirty-five. Couples would step off in waves, and at the end one couple would be left, usually in their late seventies, dancing alone while everyone applauded. The longest-married couple was the prize, and the bride and groom were supposed to take the lesson.

4. "Daddy's Little Girl"

The father-daughter dance. There were a few versions in circulation, but the Mills Brothers recording was the canonical one. Every father of the bride knew this was coming and most of them cried, even the ones who never cried. It was, for many of them, the most emotionally exposed moment of their adult lives.

5. "Sunrise, Sunset" -- from Fiddler on the Roof

The processional song, or the mother-son song, or sometimes the song that played while the parents lit the unity candle. Universally understood as the time is passing song, and it functioned as a kind of cultural permission for everyone in the room to feel sentimental at once.

6. "Wedding Song (There Is Love)" -- Paul Stookey

If the couple was getting married in a church, this song was probably in the ceremony. Stookey wrote it for a friend's wedding in 1969, and within five years it was the most-performed wedding song in America. Half the brides of 1976 walked down the aisle to it.

7. "The Chicken Dance"

Mandatory. Nobody wanted to do it. Everybody did it. It existed somewhere outside the rest of the music -- outside of taste, outside of choice. The bandleader or DJ called for it, and the entire reception, regardless of age or sobriety, formed into clusters and flapped their arms.

8. "The Hokey Pokey"

Same category as the Chicken Dance, slightly older, slightly more dignified, if either of these words can be applied to either song. The grandparents knew this one from their own youth. The toddlers learned it on the floor at the reception. The middle generations did it ironically and earnestly at once.

9. "Y.M.C.A." -- Village People

By 1979, mandatory. The DJ played it once, late in the reception, after the drinks had been flowing for a few hours, and the entire room formed the letters with their arms. The song's other associations had not yet entered the public conversation in a way that complicated its use at family weddings. It was just a fun song that everyone knew the moves to, and it functioned as the universal late-evening reset.

10. "Last Dance" -- Donna Summer

After 1978, this was usually the closing song. The DJ announced last call, the lights came up a little, Donna Summer's slow opening verse played, and then the song accelerated and everyone who was still on the floor at midnight finished the night together. Some couples chose it as a first dance too, because the slow opening was beautiful enough to count.

11. "The Twist" -- Chubby Checker

A nostalgic throwback even in 1975, because the song was already fifteen years old. The DJ played it as the generational bridge -- the grandparents had danced to it, the parents had danced to it, the kids on the floor had heard it on the radio their whole lives. Three generations could be on the floor at once, doing the same move, looking slightly ridiculous together. That was the function.

12. "Brown Eyed Girl" -- Van Morrison

The signature wedding bop of the decade. The song nobody picked specifically but the song everybody got. It came on around hour two of the reception, and the dance floor filled with couples who were not the bride and groom, doing the slightly-out-of-rhythm sway that wedding receptions specialize in. Roughly two-thirds of all wedding receptions in America between 1972 and 1985 played it at least once.

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The whole list could be reproduced, with minor regional substitutions, at any wedding in any state during the decade. That's the thing about it that's hardest to explain to anyone who didn't live through it. The country was sharing a soundtrack without anyone organizing it. Three radio stations, four television networks, and a couple of dominant record labels meant that the bride in Cleveland and the bride in Bakersfield were choosing from the same short list of acceptable first-dance songs, and the receptions ended up nearly identical.

That kind of shared cultural script has mostly faded. Weddings now have a much wider range of musical choices, which is in many ways better. But there was something about the moment when a song started and every adult in the room recognized it instantly that doesn't really happen anymore. The recognition was the wedding. The music was the connective tissue.

What was your wedding's first dance? What song still takes you straight back to a reception in 1976? Tell us in the comments -- we'd love to hear.