Gandy Dancers

November 12, 2008 4:48 AM

Gandy Dancers is a fascinating and inspiring look at the music made by the African-American workers in the south who maintained railroad tracks, "lining up" the tracks manually. This hard work required synchronized effort, and the rhythm came from improvised songs. The film features a group of retired Gandy dancers talking about and demonstrating the songs they sang and the work they did.
posted by flapjax at midnite (18 comments total)

Awesome.

My mother lived near railroad tracks as a small child, and she used to talk about going outside to hear the railroad men sing as they worked.
posted by magstheaxe at 5:38 AM on November 12, 2008

Nice post...thanks!

I've been visiting a restaurant in Ann Arbor for 40 years, called the Gandy Dancer... It is housed in the old Ann Arbor Train Depot, a beautiful place. Until today i never knew what the name was derived from...
posted by HuronBob at 5:55 AM on November 12, 2008

Let me also add, that the first song in the trailer "I don't know but I've been told..." is also very familiar to anyone in the military.. I suspect a lot of the marching cadence songs and the gandy dancer songs crossed over for obvious reasons...
posted by HuronBob at 5:57 AM on November 12, 2008

It's funny, my dad's a huge rail fan and so I grew up with trains and such, but still, I only learned of this term on hearing a song by a pub band (Johnny Devil and the Screaming Demons) up in Toronto on Bloor St. (Which I can send to anyone who'd like it. They're a fun band, and friends, so I've got permission. )
posted by FritoKAL at 6:44 AM on November 12, 2008

This is why metafilter is great!
posted by MoniqueR at 7:39 AM on November 12, 2008

Showing my age...My dads family lived in Pineville, LA near the railroad track. I can remember seeing the teams of "gandy dancers" with their long metal rods with wide flat ends come by to "striaghten" the rails. My brother and me would follow them as far as we could to listen to neat sing song cadence they had.
posted by bjgeiger at 7:56 AM on November 12, 2008

Great find, flap! I'm so excited to watch this today. As a little girl in Beaumont, TX, I remember my dad pointing out the gandy-dancers' shacks on the outskirts of town - something about the name caught my imagination.

And I'm especially thrilled to see that I know this filmmaker. How funny - I taught kindergarten to his daughter in the mid-90s, and I knew he did something with film, but I had no idea he did this kind of cultural documentation. Since those years I've gotten interested in the same topics. Reason to renew my acquaintance.

A pleasure on many counts! Thanks.
posted by Miko at 8:09 AM on November 12, 2008

My dad actually worked as a Gandy Dancer for the Santa Fe RR during the summers while in high school. This was late 1940s in Kansas. I don't remember him mentioning music; I'll have to ask. I think there were African Americans on the crews, but they were segregated.

You'd never see high school kids today doing this sort of manual labor.
posted by socrateaser at 8:38 AM on November 12, 2008

You'd never see high school kids today doing this sort of manual labor.

Sure we do. I see high school kids on landscape crews in my area. We also have them onsite regularly at my job whenever we do a tent rental - several times of year for public events - and the work of tent raising is not all that different physically, though less intensive in terms of straight hours laboring with the mallet.
posted by Miko at 8:51 AM on November 12, 2008

You'd never see high school kids today doing this sort of manual labor.

I'd have to wonder how true that is, too. Where I went to high school in rural Oregon, the guys in my class used to argue over what job was better; being a sawyer or working in the mill. It was a point of pride among these guys to have a low-paying, dangerous and physically demanding job. Granted, I haven't been in high school for years, but I can't imagine that kind of a thing has changed much.

And thanks so much for this post! I'm a HUGE fan of this type of thing, as is my father. I've forwarded this link along.
posted by Pecinpah at 10:13 AM on November 12, 2008

Pecinpah: What is a sawyer?
Thanks!
posted by Librarygeek at 11:30 AM on November 12, 2008

Once while I was in college (UMass) the Afro-Am department arranged for a group of these guys to come to campus and do a demonstration of their singing and rail-straightening - the actual dudes who did this for a living back in the day. They were pretty old in 1991, probably averaging about 65 or so.

They set up some railroad tracks (short pieces) out on the hill behind New Africa House. The gandy dancers (I don't actually recall this term being used, but it was many bowls ago) brought their straightening poles and showed us how they did their work, singing and heaving the tracks.

It was amazing, very cool and actually quite moving to hear and watch them.

I had forgotten about this - I should post up the pictures I took that day. Very neat.
posted by tristeza at 3:49 PM on November 12, 2008

My father started as a Gandy Dancer and retired over 40 years later as a VP.
His father died when he was in his late teens, and back then, the railroad would offer his job to a close male blood relative if they wanted it, so somebody could make a living for the family.
Most references admit they aren't completely sure where the name comes from, although usually they say it's the tool company. It may be an urban legend, but I was always told the name came from some followers of Ghandi, who apparently were rumored to have some ceremony or celebration or something involving dancing, and it allegedly resembled the same thing. That story is 50 some years old and was told by folks who had never seen a follower of Ghandi. In his area of the country, they did not have many actual black folks and the gangs were nearly all white.
His next job after Gandy Dancer was rivet catcher. Back then, bridges were held together with rivets (and I'd bet there are a few left although probably no longer in service). They heated the rivets over a charcoal burner on the ground until they were red hot and then threw them up to the bridge, where the next man caught it in a metal mesh basket, then the actual riveter put it through the bridge and beat the living snot out of the backside of the rivet before it cooled.
When the railroad started making them wear a hard hat, nobody would wear them because they were hot. He put on a hat, sent the gang foreman up to the top of the bridge and told him to drop a hammer on his head. He had to threaten to fire him to get him to do it, if I recall. They took to wearing them after that though. They looked like a WW 1 helmet, but made of aluminum.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 5:41 PM on November 12, 2008

Sorry, gotta step in here. The Wikipedia article almost gets it right, but I can guarantee that the Gandy Manufacturing Company did, in fact, exist and I have actually used period Gandy tools to line track during my time at the railroad museum. It's damned hard work.
posted by pjern at 6:48 PM on November 12, 2008

Oh, I'm sure that's true; it's just an amusing ancient story. You wonder how these things get started.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 7:16 PM on November 12, 2008

I can guarantee that the Gandy Manufacturing Company did, in fact, exist and I have actually used period Gandy tools to line track during my time at the railroad museum.

And, of course, one of the old men in the documentary mentions the Gandy company when discussing the origins of the term Gandy dancer.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:51 PM on November 12, 2008

. The gandy dancers (I don't actually recall this term being used, but it was many bowls ago)

I'm guessing that was the Buckingham Lining Bar Gang. They were featured at a folk festival I was involved with in 1996 and did the circuit for at least a few years - I think they did a Smithsonian Folklife Festival as well.
posted by Miko at 6:51 AM on November 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

Wow, Miko, thanks for those links to the Buckingham Lining Bar Gang. Great! I certainly would've included those in the original FPP had I known about them.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:09 PM on November 14, 2008