Skip to main content

Barnes Railroad Gandy Dancers DVD

 Collection
Identifier: MSS-3617

Overview

DVD about "Gandy Dancers" that worked on the Barnes Railroad

Dates

  • after 1985

Biographical / Historical

Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines.

In the U.S., 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 West, the Irish in the Midwest, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeast all worked as gandy dancers. Though all gandy dancers sang railroad songs, it may be that southern African American gandy dancers, with a long tradition of using song to coordinate work, were unique in their use of task-related work chants.

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-foot (1.52 m) "lining" bar, which came to be called a "gandy", as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment.[1]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandy_dancer

Extent

0.05 Linear Feet

Language of Materials

English

Provenance

Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Roland A. Barnes, 2010

General

To provide faster access to our materials, this finding aid was published without formal and final review. Email us at archives@ua.edu if you find mistakes or have suggestions to make this finding aid more useful for your research.

Source

Title
Guide to the Barnes Railroad Gandy Dancers DVD
Status
Completed
Date
2016
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin
Language of description note
English

Repository Details

Part of the The University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections Repository

Contact:
Box 870266
Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0266
205.348.0513