Saturday Night Breakdown
Notation:
Standard Notation
ABC Notation
Mandolin Tablature
Violin Tablature
traditional
PDF Files:
--- choose file type ---
Standard Notation
Mandolin Tablature
Violin Tablature
Tune Sheet
American
Play
MIDI
No audio
available
Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
"Saturday Night Breakdown" is an American and Canadian reel in 2/4 or cut time and<br> C Major. The parts are played AB (Silberberg) or AABB (Messer, Phillips, Songer).<br> This rag-time influenced reel was originally recorded in 1929 by fiddler Wil Gilmer<br> with his group The Leake County Revelers, all of whom resided in and around<br> Sebastopol, Mississippi. The quartet (which also included Dallas Jones on guitar,<br> R.O. Mosley on mandolin and banjo-mandolin, and Jim Wolverton on banjo) formed in<br> 1926 and made some forty recordings from 1927 to 1930. They were already regionally<br> popular when they recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, and had accompanied<br> Louisiana politician Huey Long on his campaign for governor in 1928. Their record<br> sales, propelled by live broadcasts from the 1000-watt WJDX (Jackson, Mississippi)<br> in a coveted 6PM-7PM Saturday night spot, made them sought after performers across<br> the southeast. The group members still kept their 'day jobs' however. In the 1980s<br> their descendants, appearing as the Leake County String Band, provided music for<br> the 1976 movie Ode to Billie Joe. <br> "Saturday Night Breakdown" was equally popular in Canada, where it was given a<br> "down east"-style treatment in the mid-20th century by radio and TV fiddlers Don<br> Messer and Ned Landry. Don Messer recorded the tune in the early 1950's followed,<br> in 1956, by New Brunswick fiddler Ned Landry (1921-2018), a three-time Canadian<br> Open Fiddle Champion who received the Order of Canada and who was inducted into<br> the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia halls of fame. A CBC program schedule for Friday,<br> December 21st, 1945, records that it was played by Messer and his band The Islanders<br> on his 5 P.M. broadcast.<br> It was printed in Messer's Way Down East (1948),<br> Messer's Anthology of Favorite Fiddle Tunes (1980),<br> Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes, vol. 1 (1994),<br> Silberberg's Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern (2002) and<br> Songer's Portland Collection (1997).<br> It was recorded by The Leake County Revelers (1929) on The Leake County Revelers:<br> Saturday Night Breakdown, 1927-1930 Recordings (1975),<br> Ned Landry and His New Brunswick Lumberjacks on Saturday Night Breakdown/The Plough<br> Boy’s Reel (1956) and<br> Ned Landry on Saturday Night Breakdown (1963). <br>
Click
here
for a full page view.