“Dancing in the Moonlight” is the sonic essence of a warm summer night. The ’70s yacht rock staple was first made famous by King Harvest, but its appeal has spanned generations. Who wouldn’t want to dance in the moonlight and find supernatural delight?
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Despite the sunny disposition of the song, songwriter Sherman Kelly had quite a tragic inspiration that spurred him to pen this hit. Check out the surpassingly dark history of this song, below.
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Behind the Meaning
We get it almost every night
When that moon is big and bright
It’s a supernatural delight
Everybody’s dancin’ in the moonlight
According to Kelly, this song was the direct result of him, his girlfriend, and some friends heading out on a boat in St. Croix. While that seems par for the course when thinking of this summer-laced track, things took a bad turn as soon as the sun set.
Due to their seasickness, Kelly and his girlfriend, Adrienne, decided to camp out on the shore for the night. In the middle of their sleep, a group of guys came up with baseball bats and started to hit Kelly repeatedly until he lost consciousness. All the while, Kelly said they “lined up to rape Adrienne.”
Though the events are a little foggy to him now, apparently he mustered up the courage to attack the group, growling at them with enough force to make them go away. After all was said and done, the hospital gave Kelly bad odds of surviving his blows.
Not only did Kelly survive, but he wrote this song as a dreamscape of what that night might have looked like if the world wasn’t full of nasty characters looking to do some harm.
Everybody here is out of sight
They don’t bark, and they don’t bite
They keep things loose, they keep ’em tight
Everybody was dancin’ in the moonlight
The song would eventually reach the top 20 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart with King Harvest’s rendition and go multi-platinum in the U.K. with Toploader’s version. Needless to say, Kelly found major success with this songwriting effort.
“I felt that I was rewarded for taking this horrible bummer and getting it up onto higher ground–celebrating the positive,” Kelly once explained. “I think the universe enjoyed my response.”
(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)
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