Gandy dancer

Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers, especially those in the Southern United States, who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. No one knows the origin of the term for certain, but it is generally thought that it was a combination of gandy, from the Chicago-based Gandy Manufacturing Company, maker of railroad tools, and the "dancing" movements of the workers using a 5 foot rod ("gandy") as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment.

History

Though rail tracks were held in place by wooden ties (sleepers outside the U.S.) and the mass of the crushed rock (ballast) beneath them, each pass of a train around a curve would, through centripetal force and vibration, produce a tiny shift in the tracks. If allowed to accumulate, such shifts could eventually cause a derailment; work crews had to pry them back into place routinely.

For each stroke, a worker would lift his gandy and force it into the ballast to create a fulcrum, then throw himself forward using the gandy to check his full weight (making the "huh" sound recorded in the lyrics below) so the gandy would push the rail toward the inside of the curve. Even with all impacts from the work crew of eight, ten, or more, any progress made in shifting the track would not become visible until after a large number of repetitions.

The same ground crews also performed the other aspects of track maintenance, such as removing weeds, tamping down ballast, unloading ties and rails, and replacing rotten ties. The work was extremely difficult and the pay was low, but it was one of the only jobs available for southern black men at that time, and railroad men were highly regarded in their communities.

The British equivalent is "Navvy" from "Navigator", originally builders of canals or "inland navigations". In the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican-American track workers were colloquially "traqueros".

Songs and chants

Rhythm was necessary both to synchronize the manual labor, and to maintain the morale of workers. Work songs and hollers sung in a call-and-response format were used to coordinate the various aspects of all rail maintenance; slower speech-like "dogging" calls to direct the picking up and manipulating of the steel rails and unloading, hauling and stacking of the ties, and more rhythmic songs for spiking and lining (aligning) the rails and tamping the bed of gravel beneath them. In 1939 John Lomax recorded a number of railroad songs which contain an example of an "unloading steel rails" call, and it is available at the American Memory site. The Leadbelly song "Take This Hammer" (available at the YouTube online video website) is an example of a spike driving song.

Anne Kimzey of the Alabama Center For Traditional Culture writes: "All-black gandy dancer crews used songs and chants as tools to help accomplish specific tasks and to send coded messages to each other so as not to be understood by the foreman and others. The lead singer, or caller, would chant to his crew, for example, to realign a rail to a certain position. His purpose was to uplift his crew, both physically and emotionally, while seeing to the coordination of the work at hand. It took a skilled, sensitive caller to raise the right chant to fit the task at hand and the mood of the men. Using tonal boundaries and melodic style typical of the blues, each caller had his own signature. The effectiveness of a caller to move his men has been likened to how a preacher can move a congregation."

Railroad and other work songs have been recognized as a major influence on later blues music.

Documentary

In 1994, folklorist Maggie Holtzberg, working as a folklore fieldworker to document traditional folk music in Alabama, produced a documentary film Gandy Dancers. Holtzberg relates, "Knowing that the occupational art of calling was fast receding into the collective memories of railroad retirees, I was motivated to locate individuals and document what I could of their passive repertoire of work song lore, before it was lost. At the start, I contacted railroad company officials. When I asked about finding gandy dancers to talk to, there was often a short pause and then a perplexed comment as to how I knew of this arcane tradition. One man laughed and told me I would need to contact a medium since the use of section gangs was abolished in the 1960s. There were, however, some encouraging leads. An owner of a railroad maintenance company remembered "one caller with a real high pitched voice who could go ten hours a day and never repeat a chant." He agreed that it was important to document what remained of the calling tradition but said, 'One man couldn't begin to explain the process of lining track. You would have to get a crew together to do it,' which, in the end, was exactly what we did."

It had been many years since modern machinery had replaced section crews, so Holtzberg spoke with older or retired roadmasters who might remember the callers, or know where they might be living. She managed to locate a number of callers and interviewed them in their homes. However, the men found it difficult to call track in their living room as opposed to being out on the track with the sound of rapping lining bars to call against. They met at a nearby railroad club that was rebuilding a depot museum. In this familiar environment the men quickly began to remember the old calls, and especially so when a train passed by blowing its whistle. Holtzberg recalls the words of John Cole, at 82 the oldest of the men:

"Listen to that train. Yeah! That's a train! The hawk and buzzard went up north . . . You hear it blowing. I got a gal live behind the jail . . . That's a train . . . all it took was that noise." The train whistle blew and dopplered down in pitch.

The film was completed in 1994 and is available at the website folkstreams.net.

Typical song lyrics

The caller needed to know the best calls to suit a particular crew or occasion. Sometimes calls with a religious theme were used and other times calls that would evoke sexual imaginary were in order. An example:

I don't know but I've been told

Susie has a jelly roll

I don't know...huh

But I've been told...huh

Susie has...huh

A jelly roll...huh

More examples of lining songs from the documentary Gandy Dancers:

Up and down this road I go

Skippin' and dodging a 44

Hey man won't you line 'um...huh

Hey won't you line 'um...huh

Hey won't you line 'um...huh

Hey won't you line 'um...huh

Well I've been out East

And way out West

I believe I like

Alabama the best

Been out East...huh

Been out West...huh

I think I like...huh

Alabama the best...huh

I got a gal in every town

I didn't want to see her

'Til the sun went down

I got a gal...huh

In every town...huh

Didn't want to see her...huh

'Til the sun went down...huh

Popular culture

The former Michigan Central depot in Ann Arbor, Michigan which now houses the "Gandy Dancer" restaurant.

"The Gandy Dancers' Ball" is a song recorded by Frankie Laine in 1951, but with gandy dancers as actual dancers at a railroad workers' ball. Laine sang it with a chorus of dancers in the 1955 comedy film Bring Your Smile Along.

Singer/political activist Utah Phillips, in Moose Turd Pie, told a tall tale of working as a gandy dancer in the American southwest. Phillips repeated the claim (above) about the source of the workers' shovels.

References

• Music history and comments on the labor.
• Notes on the term's origin.
• Phillips, Bruce. "Moose Turd Pie" (mp3). Retrieved 2008-01-12.

External links

• http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/lomaxbib:@field(SUBJ+@od1(Railroad+work+songs))