Irish Gandy Dancer: A tale of building the Transcontinental Railroad
Black historian and journalist Thomas Fleming began his career as a bellhop and then spent five years as a cook for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In a weekly series of articles he wrote of his memories of the Mexican section hands in the s and 30s. He recalled that the Southern Pacific gave them a place to sleep: The company would take old boxcars, remove the wheels, and lay them alongside the tracks.
He remembers that the workers had a lot of children who attended the public schools, but the ones he met during his childhood were "kind of meek, and took a lot of abuse from the other kids". Fleming says that "you found them right outside of all towns in California; that was part of the landscape. During the early s when the U. During the war years so many of the men were away that the U.
A article in The Valley Gazette carried the story of several local women who had worked on the Reading Railroad in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania as gandy dancers. However, she said, "One day attitudes changed when a voice boomed out, 'I am sure proud of you ladies! Michael Quinion identified the first known printed use of the term gandy dancer as , [18] but with so little understanding of the origin of the term it is impossible to know when it came into being.
An article in the May edition of the weekly publication The Outlook New York asks the question, "What is a "gandy dancer"? A story published in the August edition of Boys' Life , a monthly magazine published by the Boy Scouts of America for boys 6 to 18, mentions the term "gandy".
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In the story, "Eddie Parker", about 17 or 18 years old and characterized as the all-American type, takes on a job as a worker in a railway section crew. His new co-workers are all Italian immigrants, or, as referred to in the story, "snipes". The "snipes" are characterized as lazy, stupid, and lovers of garlic, olive oil, and Italian music.
He explains that he "hooked a grind organ onto the under frame and attached the handle to the axle crank.. Throughout the story, the workers are referred to as section crew workers, but the hand-car is referred to as a "gandy". In the s Maintenance of Way laborers were still being called "gandy dancers" by the track foremen in Oregon, and the tamping rod was called a "gandy pole" by most workers or simply a "gandy". While most southern railroad maintenance workers were African American, gandy dancers were not strictly southern or African American.
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Section crews were often made up of recent immigrants and ethnic minorities who vied for steady work despite poor wages and working conditions, and hard physical labor. Though all gandy dancers sang railroad songs, it may be that black gandy dancers, with a long tradition of using song to coordinate work, were unique in their use of task-related work 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 ballast beneath them.
In 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. There is no doubt that country singer Jimmie Rodgers was influenced by the working songs of the gandy dancers. His father, a section foreman in Meridian, Mississippi, brought his son with him to work as a water boy where he would have been exposed to their musical chants.
Irish Gandy Dancer: A tale of building the Transcontinental Railroad
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.
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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. Veteran section gangs lining track, especially with an audience, often embellished their work with a one-handed flourish and with one foot stepping out and back on beats four, one, and two, between the two-armed pulls on the lining bars on beat three.
Here is a vintage gandy dancer video which demonstrates the singing, the dancing-like rhythm, the lining tool, and a very large crew note that the ballast has been removed, perhaps allowing a much greater movement of the track than most sources mention: In , folklorist Maggie Holtzberg, working as a folklore fieldworker to document traditional folk music in Alabama, produced a documentary film Gandy Dancers.
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.
Irish Gandy Dancer: A Tale of Building the Transcontinental Railroad by Ryan Michael Collins
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:. All Listings filter applied. Condition see all Condition. Item Location see all Item Location.
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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. His war time savings nearly depleted, he is determined to find work and joins hundreds of his countrymen in one of the greatest engineering quests of the time, building the Trans-Continental Railroad. McGlinchey provides a first person narrative of the events he encounters that overturn many of his contemporary views of race and religion while at the same time providing an unvarnished view of people great and small that shaped this grand endeavor. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
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