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Dancing Nancies is a song by Virginia jam band Dave Matthews Band off of their RCA label debut album Under the Table and Dreaming. The song describes a man who is dissatisfied with his life, wondering if he could have been anyone other than himself. He frequently tries to go back and comfort himself, wondering, "Dark clouds will hang over me sometimes / but I'll work it out." The song ends with him wondering if he could have been a "dancing nancy." In live performances, the song will start out with a repeated four-note guitar rhythm played by Matthews while he improvises lyrics about the man talking to a bartender. The song then starts out softly with a simplistic rising note line by Boyd Tinsley and a military-like drum beat by Carter Beauford. This melody is continually built upon before the song comes to its climax. At the end of the song, the band switches to a stop-time melody that Tinsley improvises on top of. This, like the beginning of the song, starts out softly and continues to build, with LeRoi Moore's sax line gradually becoming more and more prominent. The song will normally last 9-11 minutes. An acoustic version of this song was featured on the band's early EP Recently. The song is also occasionally used as an intro track to Warehouse, another Under the Table and Dreaming fan favorite, such as it was in Live Trax: Vol. 6 at Fenway Park in Boston and in the CD and DVD releases of The Central Park Concert.
