Barnes Railroad Gandy Dancers DVD

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