Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd!

Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level.

In other words, I was practicing being a performer, not an arranger.

But then, of course, I came up with another idea.

I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something.

It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures.

And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV—a secondary dominant!

So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub.

It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony and the motion toward that IV chord, so you get this "ahhh!" moment when you finally arrive.

Of course, the secondary dominant is a common device. A staple in any arranger's harmony toolbox. I even use a one later on when I modulate to B-flat. But this was different. It wasn't about modulation. It was about color—and lubrication, apparently! And the moment I heard it, I knew it was staying.

I could describe it in even more detail here, but I talk it out in the video below.

And in this next video, I play the whole section, with just a few hesitations, and you can hear how it sounds in context.

I love this. I am a happy piano nerd today!

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