page_title: Gandy dancer
section_title: Documentary
hierarchical_section_title: Gandy dancer / Songs and chants / Documentary
caption_attribution_description: English: Northern Pacific Class E-5, 4-6-0 locomotive NP 300 (formerly NP 629, later NP 326), pulling the North Coast Limited train of the Northern Pacific Railway Co., possibly on its inaugural journey on April 29, 1900. Photo by George M. Weister of the Angelus Studio, Portland, Oregon. Probably taken beside the track near the Columbia River between Portland and Goble where the train would be put on a specially constructed train ferry, the Tacoma, and be taken across the Columbia R. to Kalama on the Washington side.
context_page_description: 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", 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, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeastern United States all worked as gandy dancers.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: North Coast Limited train of the Northern Pacific Railway, around 1900. Photo illustrates the track, railroad ties, and the built-up bed, which section crews were required to maintain
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