Теміртас жол жұмысшыларының сленгі атауы

Slang term for workers on railroad tracks

Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers in the United States, more formally referred to as section hands, who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. The British equivalents of the term gandy dancer are navvy (from navigator), originally builders of canals, or inland navigations, for builders of railway lines, and platelayer for workers employed to inspect and maintain the track. In the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican American track workers were colloquially traqueros. In the United States, early 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. The Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans in the Western United States, the Irish in the Midwestern United States, African Americans in the Southern United States, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeastern United States all worked as gandy dancers. There are various theories about the derivation of the term, but most refer to the "dancing" movements of the workers using a specially manufactured 5 feet (2 m) "lining" bar, which came to be called a "gandy", as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment.

The term has an uncertain origin. A majority of early northern railway workers were Irish, so an Irish or Gaelic derivation for the English term seems possible. Others have suggested that the term gandy dancer was coined to describe the movements of the workers themselves, i. e., the constant "dancing" motion of the track workers as they lunged against their tools in unison to nudge the rails, often timed by a chant; as they carried rails; or, speculatively, as they waddled like ganders while running on the railroad ties. But most researchers have identified a "Gandy Shovel Company" or, variously, "Gandy Manufacturing Company" or "Gandy Tool Company" reputed to have existed in Chicago as the source of the tools from which gandy dancers took their name. Some sources even list the goods manufactured by the company, i. e., "tamping bars, claw bars, picks, and shovels." But others have cast doubt on the existence of such a company. The Chicago Historical Society has been asked for information on the company so many times that they have said, "It's like a legend," but they have never been able to find a Gandy company in their old records.

Michael Quinion identified the first known (printed) use of the term gandy dancer as 1918, 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 1918 edition of the weekly publication The Outlook (New York) asks the question:

What is a "gandy dancer"? The words were on a blackboard outside a store on the Bowery. In old times they might have suggested the proximity of a cheap dance house. But the Bowery has changed. Within the space of a few blocks there are now more than a score of "labor bureaus" where formerly were low dives and "suicide halls". Inquiry of an Italian employee of the bureau elicited the information that a "gandy dancer" is a railway worker who tamps down the earth between the ties, or otherwise "dances" on the track. The announcement read:

Men wanted for track work cinder ballast no rock straight time rain or shine paid weekly accommodation very good. Board furnished $5 per week. It is a good job particularly for veteran gandy dancers. It's a few miles out and requires no weeks toil to get back to this burg. A story published in the August 1931 edition of Boys' Life, a monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America for boys 6 to 18, mentions the term "gandy". 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. "Eddie" figures a way to get the Italians to work at pumping the hand car – used to get to and from the section the crew would be working on that day – by using their love of music. He explains that he "hooked a grind organ onto the under frame and attached the handle to the axle crank ,[and] whenever the axel turns the handle has to follow it." Throughout the story, the workers are referred to as section crew workers, but the hand car is referred to as a "gandy". In the 1960s Maintenance of Way laborers were still being called "gandy dancers" by track foremen in Oregon, and the tamping rod was called a "gandy pole" by most or simply a "gandy".

While most southern railroad maintenance workers were African American, gandy dancers were not strictly southern or African American. 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. The Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans in the West, the Irish in the Midwest, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeast laid and maintained track as well. 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 1939 John Lomax recorded a number of railroad songs which contain an example of an "unloading steel rails" call; 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. Rodgers went on to be known as the "Singing Brakeman" and the Father of Country Music. 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."

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 Folkstreams website. The trailer for the film is available at YouTube.

In the armed services, a military cadence call, also known as a Jody call, is a traditional call and response work song sung by military personnel while running or marching. As a sort of work song, military cadences take their rhythms from the work being done. Many cadences have a call and response structure wherein one soldier initiates a line and the remaining soldiers complete it, thus instilling teamwork and camaraderie for completion. Like lining calls, they also serve to mock one's superiors, vent anger and frustration, relieve boredom, and to boost spirits by poking fun or boasting. It is believed that Private Willie Lee Duckworth Sr., who was stationed at Fort Slocum, New York as one of eight “Colored Infantrymen” in 1944, made up “Sound Off”, also known as the “Duckworth Chant”, which is used to this day in the U. S. Army and other branches of the military. Media researcher Barry Dornfeld, who co authored the documentary "Gandy Dancer", believes that
Duckworth's military cadence calls were influenced by his familiarity with track lining calls. Dornfeld writes, "I recently uncovered a connection between the southern African American tradition of call and response works songs and military cadence calls used in drill training, popularly known as “Jody calls.”

<blockquote>Duckworth, who was born in 1924 in Washington County, Georgia, would have been familiar with the use of work chants sung for all kinds of agricultural work. He was also the same generation of the gandy dancers who used chants to line track. At the time he was drafted to serve in WW II, Duckworth was working in a sawmill. He was sent to a provisional training center in Fort Slocum, N. Y., in March 1944. As the story goes, Duckwork, on orders from a non commissioned officer, improvised his own drill for the soldiers in his unit. Soon after, all the ranks were buzzing and keeping rhythm. Col. Bernard Lentz, who was the base commander at the Fort, approached Duckworth and asked where he developed his unique chant. “I told him it came from calling hogs back home,” Duckworth said. “I was scared, and that was the only thing I could think of to say.”

"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. In 1962, The Ventures recorded the song "Gandy Dancer", an original instrumental composition that was released on their album Going to the Ventures Dance Party. Singer/political activist Bruce "Utah" Phillips, in Moose Turd Pie, told a tall tale of working as a gandy dancer in the American southwest. Phillips ascribed the source of the workers' shovels to the possibly mythical Gandy Shovel Company of Chicago. Gandy dancers are celebrated in The Gandy Dancer Festival, in Mazomanie, Wisconsin. The Ann Arbor (Michigan) railroad station was converted into a restaurant called the Gandy Dancer. Folk singer Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly), sang about the work of the gandy dancer in the lyrics of an unaccompanied work song, "Linin' Track". It has since been recorded by many others, including Dave "Snaker" Ray and Taj Mahal. The bassist Fred Turner of the rock group Bachman Turner Overdrive wrote a song called "Little Gandy Dancer" that appeared on the group's first album in 1973.