The August in-person meeting of the Austin Ukulele Society was truly a supernatural delight, and a fine and natural sight! To get the evening started, over 130 ukulele players from all walks of life introduced themselves. Everybody there was outta sight! Then Bob led us through our warm up song – Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”

If you saw the super moon on August 1st, you weren’t surprised by our featured song choice: “Dancing in the Moonlight.” This feel-good tune was a big hit for the French-American band King Harvest in 1972 and again for the English band Toploader in 2000. “Dancing in the Moonlight” is one of those songs you likely know from its regular airplay, numerous covers, and features in commercials and film, and we had a blast singing and strumming it!

Bob shared some details about his arrangement of “Dancing in the Moonlight” and then gave us a lovely demonstration of it. We learned some great tips from Bob, as he taught us parts of the song including the strum pattern, chords and chord progressions, picking options, and harmonizing opportunities. As we practiced the components of the song, we got better and better and sounded great when we put it together.

We set the song aside for a bit to enjoy a truly magnificent open mic portion of our evening. Jason Castille, Kathy Murray and Bill Jones, Kaia, Evan Kolvoord, and Sho and Shin Humphries all performed terrific covers of songs they really made their own. We hope you’ll get up and play a song for us sometime, too, if you haven’t yet or in a long time!

After the open mic set, we practiced “Dancing in the Moonlight” again and recorded it for you to enjoy and play along with from home. We hope you have as much fun with it as we did! Look for it coming soon to our YouTube channel. 🙂

To play along with us, you can download the lyrics and chords for our arrangement of “Dancing in the Moonlight” or download a copy of the presentation and instruction guide (what we project on the screen for all to follow along, including exercises and drills).

Many thanks, as always, to Jen and Lyda and the whole AUS team, for their tireless efforts to make the meeting successful. And as always, we owe a big thanks to Aaron Lewis for his support on U-bass!

We look forward to “seeing” you all at our August 24th YouTube livestream meeting! And we’ll see you back in person on Thursday, September 14. Until then, keep strummin’! 🙂

For more downloadable music, visit our Ukulele Music Library. For more Austin Ukulele Society videos, check out our YouTube Channel.

We appreciate your support and interest. If you’d like to make a donation to the Austin Ukulele Society (a 501(c)(3) organization), visit our Square Donation site. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please fill out our this short sign-up form. For any other inquiries, please contact us or shoot us an email if you have previous correspondence with us.

Ukulele Society T-shirts!
We are proud to unveil our latest shirt, new for 2022: the “AUS Classic Ukulele,” design, hot off the presses! All of our shirts are thoughtfully designed by the talented Lyda Guz!

The shirts are silk screened here in Austin at a fantastic locally-owned print shop and are available for purchase. The new “AUS Classic Ukulele” design, “Ukulele Around the World,” “10th Anniversary,” Mermaid, Cowboy,” “Austin Lasso” and other shirts are $25. We also have vinyl decals with the AUS logo for $1 each. We can accept cash or a check made out to Austin Ukulele Society; you can also make payment via Venmo or PayPal. Please drop us a line if you’d like to purchase a shirt (or two or three). 🙂 At this time, we can only ship orders within the U.S.