Everybody Loves Saturday Night Arrangement

Here's a sort of mix-and-match arrangement of "Everybody Loves Saturday Night," from Nigeria.  There are two versions in this arrangement, one for beginners and one for second-year orchestra students.  Each version has its own melody and harmony.  The beginner version has an all open-string harmony with a simplified melody with just D string notes, and the advanced version is mostly D string notes with a few G string notes (including a C# on the G string).  Students did really well learning the syncopated bits after hearing the lyrics sung.  We also would stomp our feet on the eighth rest in practice.

My students studied this piece in the fall of 2020, when we couldn't have full orchestra or in-person concerts.  My colleague and I ended up recording ourselves individually playing the different parts using the Acapella App and then added pictures of our students to create an "Orchestra At-Home Winter Concert" play-along video, which we also used for our virtual version of String Fest that year.  That being said, this is a super flexible arrangement--you could play through the piece twice and assign or give choice to who plays which parts when. 

Here's a link to some history of the song from Art Podell and results of research about its origins from Deanna deCampos (which shares that the song is actually from Ghana from at least 1932 rather than from Nigeria in the 1950s), as well as a website with translations to more languages than I included (and even more languages here).

Sheet music (Alpha notation included at the end of each document):

• Beginning parts (PDF) (melody/open-string harmony)
• Beginning parts (Word document)
• Advanced parts (PDF) (melody/harmony)
• Advanced parts (Word document)

Sheet music with links to audio files (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:

• Beginning parts with audio files (PDF) 
• Beginning parts with audio files (Word document)
• Advanced parts with audio files (PDF)
• Advanced parts with audio files (Word document)

Enjoy!