I'm Luke DeWitt

My thoughts on "Dancing in the Moonlight"

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I recently worked out the chords to "Dancing in the Moonlight" by King Harvest. It's one of my favorite oldies songs, and it's really fun to sing. Here's my take on the song after having played it a few times

the basics

The song is in Cm. It loops a 4-bar chord progression for the entire song: iv7 | VII | III | i7. Every 3rd bar, the III chord walks back down to the i7. I like to think it walks down via v, rather than ii°

This makes the chord progression: iv7 | VII | III - v | i7

The melodies use a lot of 8th notes and off-beat rhythms; they sound very happy and dancy. I suppose that matches the vibe of the lyrics :D

is the song in Cm? Or Eb?

You could make a strong argument for either. I'm going with Cm because of the chords in the song Intro. It starts by going around the progression once normally. Then, on the 2nd pass, major-key-sounding III is replaced with a distinctly minor V7:

# intro
i7 | iv7 | VII | III - iv | i7 | iv7 | VII | V7 | [i]

I got curious about this and looked it up. Most sheet music just shows the "3 flats" key signature, and doesn't specify

I did find a Hooktheory page from user MusicEndorser3546 that seems to agree with me. Shoutout the legend, I'm something of a music endorser myself

something neat about this song

The intro is 9 measures, but the chord progression is only 4. There's an extra measure in here... I've heard the song countless times and I never noticed this. When I'm playing an instrument, that "You Must Count To Four" instinct kicks in, and this jumped out at me right away

You might have also noticed that the song starts with i7. Usually that's a very normal thing to do; it's the tonic. In this case, the song starts with the end of the chord progression. This is a neat trick! It reinforces the "minor key sound" of the song, and it goes hand-in-hand with the V7 | i cadence at the end of the intro

I'm guessing they did this for two reasons:

  1. The keyboard part sounds really cool. It "feels right" to start on i. They probably wrote this first, and built the song around it.
  2. The verse melody starts on beat 2 of the previous measure; it basically adds an entire bar anyway