“Midnight Moonlight” was written by Peter Rowan during his late-1960s and early-1970s songwriting period, after his time with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and before his solo career took its modern shape. The song was recorded on October 8, 1973 by Old and in the Way — the short-lived but influential acoustic-string supergroup of Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Vassar Clements, John Kahn, and Rowan — and released on the band’s self-titled February 1975 album.
The Old and in the Way recording is one of the defining cuts of the early-1970s newgrass-into-bluegrass crossing — a piece written in the older mountain-modal vein but performed by an ensemble that pulled at its harmonic edges, with Garcia’s banjo and Grisman’s mandolin both contributing to the recording’s distinctive sound. The album was a centerpiece of Rounder’s mid-1970s catalogue and helped establish the acoustic-roots-meets-bluegrass aesthetic that would define newgrass through the 1980s.
The lyric is a moonlit-meeting piece: the narrator asking his sweetheart to come out and meet him in the midnight moonlight, the language pulling on older mountain-and-courtship traditions. Garcia later performed it with the Jerry Garcia Band, and the song has been recorded by Tish Hinojosa, Darrell Scott, the Be Good Tanyas, and a long list of acoustic acts. It works as a slow-to-moderate vocal feature in G with a strong harmony slot.
