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From PRX. We're standing on the High Line on Manhattan's west side, looking out towards the Hudson River. This is a vibrant green public space built on an elevated railway line from the 1900s. But look past the park's swaying wildflowers and cool art installations. Along the pathways, you can still see the old tracks where freight trains carried coal, dairy, and beef to waterfront businesses and residences.

Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

New York, with its vast subway system and its bustling pin station, was shaped by the railroads both above and below ground. These tracks fueled the city's growth, driving its economy and swelling its population. But beneath that progress lies a deeper story about the hands that built them. They arrived on different ships at different times, but their paths met here.

People of African origin and people who originate from Ireland both have a catastrophic crossing on an ocean. They both leave everything behind. Everything. Except their epic memory.

The Irish, fleeing hunger and oppression, and African Americans, bearing the weight of years of enslavement and displacement, they labored here together, building a city that shunned them. They took the jobs nobody else wanted to take. They were the infrastructure. They were the sand hogs. They were the gandy dancers. They fought in the wars. In their shared struggle for survival, racism and discrimination often pitted them against each other.

While there are instances of this tension and conflict and competition, there was a coming together that coexisted with the conflict.

They were also listening to the songs of joy, the songs of laughter, the songs of sorrow. And they were making gumbo.

From Silk Road and PRX, this is American Railroad. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. At this stop, we're looking at the story of Irish and Black laborers in New York, the work they did on the railroad, and the music they made that inspires us today. Imagine the steady beat of hammers striking iron rail, spikes driven into wood and steel, or picks and axes swinging hard against rock. And in the midst of it all, voices rising in song. The workers who laid down tracks for the American railroads were called gandy dancers, after the choreographed movement required to do their back-breaking jobs. Their rhythmic work songs are a shared language, one that kept crews together and helped pass the time. But they did more than that. They held the stories of the people building the railroad, many of whom were Black and Irish. Blending their cultural traditions as they worked, they created something uniquely American.

I love the idea of picks and shovels and rocks and blasts becoming this percussion orchestra that people heard all day long, and their heartbeat and their pulse be lined up with the syncopation of work.

That's artist and scholar Linwood Sloan, also known as Lenny, who's been researching this railroad music.

I am a cultural warrior, an artivist, trained as a dancer, schooled as a director, and on the road as an entrepreneur.

Lenny joined Silk Road at one of our workshops for the American Railroad Project, where our musicians team up with historians and local cultural groups to learn about the past and create new music. In New York City, we collaborated with the Irish Arts Center.

My name is Kestrel Wolbermuth, and I am the Associate Director of Programming at Irish Arts Center. The center was founded in the 1970s, in Hell's Kitchen on West 51st Street, in kind of a tiny little black box theater space. And it really started as kind of a community center and a place for recent Irish immigrants to the city to kind of gather and get to know each other and experience the Irish culture together.

The Silk Road workshop at IAC took place over three days in spring of 2023 and brought together a trio of Silk Road artists. Kaoru Watanabe, who plays Japanese flute and percussion, Syrian-born clarinetist Kinan Azme, and speaking here, Maeve Gilchrist on Celtic Harp.

I was so blown away.

by this rare combination of the music itself being fantastic, but also the emphasis on the philosophy behind the notes and why collaborating cross-culturally is important.

The workshop culminated in a concert at IAC, part of a series of performances we call Train Station Trios. You'll be hearing excerpts of that concert throughout this episode. Here's Silk Road Program Manager Adam Gershack introducing the event that night.

And they took these histories, these stories, and improvised, took melodies from old music, and really meditated on the themes that you'll be seeing here tonight and turned it into something incredibly beautiful.

It was an interesting look into the process of music making to see how the process could be so joyful and then produce something that was so tense and heavy at times. The audience was pretty gripped and kind of carried along with the whole rhythm of the piece and the tide of the storytelling.

A hill gives way and slides and covers 57 young Irishmen. They are buried where they fall. Progress lays tracks over them.

I think the biggest surprise for me was how eager the musicians were to incorporate Lenny's text and stories and history.

As a Black historian dedicated to educating the public on African American history and heritage, it might seem unexpected that Lenny connected with Silk Road through the Irish Arts Center. But the mingling of Black and Irish traditions has been part of his work for decades.

I was asked to write an article by Bob Callahan, who had Callahan's Irish Quarterly. They asked me to write an article about why the American minstrel show tradition was primarily the domain of Irishmen. The article was called Irish Mornings and African Afternoons, and it followed famine Irishmen into America who could raise themselves up from the canal and the coal mine by performing on the American stage in blackface.

Lenny's article caught the attention of Mick Maloney, renowned performer, folklorist, and historian of Irish American music.

And though your body's bent in two, the victory you have won, where you sow the seeds of justice in your daughters and your sons.

I was a fan of Mick Maloney's from his Pennsylvania folk music festivals in Philadelphia. He was a fan of mine through my writing, and we started a 40-year collaboration looking for the connections between African and Irish music in the diasporas. It contributed to what Americans call folk music, stage music and dance.

You were my first major education in that complex, untangled story of relationships between African Americans and Irish people in their new home. 38% of African Americans have Irish DNA, and that has come as a great shock to a lot of Irish American people.

That's Mick Maloney speaking with Lenny in a 2024 documentary that explores their work. It's called Two Roads, produced with Ace Films and the Irish Repertory Theatre. Unfortunately, Mick didn't get to see the film released. He died in 2022.

He had a stroking past away, but his music endures. His memory is in my DNA.

There's a wonderful perseverance to the Irish. Silk Road musician Maeve Gilchrist again. The Irish have travelled across the globe. They're in every corner of the planet, and I think it's due to a need for opportunity, perhaps some inherent restlessness, and certainly a talent for reinventing themselves. being able to work incredibly hard and take on the dirgiest of the jobs going and create life for themselves.

Most of us learned about the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800s as the catalyst for mass Irish immigration to the U.S. The Irish過 different places.

I'm Dr. Miriam Nyhan Gray. I'm a historian and I teach at MIC Limerick in Ireland.

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25% Irish-born. That is not including their American-born children and grandchildren, etc. This is why New York would become the largest Irish settlement in the world.

Miriam says the poverty and desperation that brought Irish immigrants to New York

often landed them in low-paying, low-status jobs. These tend to be highly rural immigrants. They come from tiny farms and plots of land in a very, very rural society and economy.

The Irish could be found in all types of labour in the 19th century, the men working on the docks or in sanitation and construction jobs, while the women found places in domestic service,

taking in laundry or working in garment factories. The Irish pour into the United States at a really opportune moment in terms of the development of the country economically and technologically. So that's why you're finding them in the construction of the railroads. That's why we find them in the constructions of the subways in New York. That's why we find them in sand hogs and all these different roles.

The New York Central Railroad, known as the NYC, was formed in 1853 by combining smaller lines, including New York's first, the Mohawk and Hudson. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the former steamboat tycoon, took control in 1867, rapidly expanding the railroad to connect New York City to Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. At its peak, the NYC spanned 26,000 miles, moving people and goods across the region. Irish workers were drawn to the railroad because it offered better wages than they could get back home, and the companies would hire immigrants without specific skills or education. Many Irish labourers saw it as a path to move up to skilled jobs or supervisory roles, a rare chance for social mobility.

These were highly sought-after wage-paying jobs, and there would have been competition to kind of get into these opportunities and to the passing on opportunities to compatriots. There would have been a lot of trying to look after family members or cousins or people from the same county in Ireland.

After the Civil War, many freed Black men also found work on the railroads, taking jobs like laying tracks or working as porters. Despite tough conditions and racial discrimination, the work provided steady employment, much like it did for Irish immigrants. But as Miriam and Lenny point out, Black and Irish labour was not valued equally.

There would have been a sense of the Irish workers being a bit disposable, this sense of, you know, kind of, that there were masses of them and they were pretty replaceable if something happens.

Before the Civil War and before the end of slavery, an enslaved person had a value, like your car, like your television, had a tangible value. An Irishman did not. And so the hardest work, the most dangerous work, went to the Irishman, because if he fell, you got another. If your enslaved person fell or your indentured freedman fell, you lost the contract and the value of his work. Thus it created this tension.

Lenny Sloan referred to this conflict during the Silk Road workshop at Irish Arts Centre in this passage from the live performance.

And so they held our coats while we fought each other in the dust, Irishmen and African, while they lusted for the dollar, while they ignored our shouts and hollers.

An explosive historical example of the tension was the draft riots in New York City, which broke out in response to the Union's new draft law during the Civil War. The 1863 Enrollment Act allowed wealthier citizens to avoid conscription by paying $300 to hire a substitute to serve in their place. The substitute's cut was $100, and newly arrived Irish took these jobs to make some money quickly.

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which was given us throughout 2020.

in the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York.

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robbing them and setting them on fire. From 21st, the mob have just broken open gun store on 3rd Avenue and our army.

11 days of rioting, 165 people killed. Blocks and blocks of New York City burned down. And hatred between blacks and Irish that lasted for 40 years.

Some of the conflict between African Americans and Irish Americans and Irish immigrants really speaks more to how the Irish are coming to terms with them being looked down upon as mere Irish, as Catholics, etc., etc., but also an awareness that they were falling on, quote unquote, the right side of the color line, as that was apparent to them, the tough journey that people of African descent were having, that it really kind of made it all the more loaded for the Irish to try and move up that ladder as quickly as they can.

People of African origin and people who originate from Ireland both have a catastrophic crossing on an ocean. They both leave everything behind, everything, except their epic memory. And they have to adapt that memory to new place, new resources, and new abilities. All these people were thrown together, confronting each other at the same time, all for the same place on the bottom.

While there are instances of this tension and conflict and competition, there are also rich examples of African Americans and Irish Americans living side by side with another, forming families, creating community. There was a coming together that coexisted with the conflict.

When we return, how Black and Irish workers labored together on the tracks and created a cultural gumbo that helped shape American music. Later, Silk Road musician Maeve Gilchrist pays homage to the Irish railroad worker. That's coming up on American Railroad. You're listening to American Railroad. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. Hell's Kitchen is one of New York City's most iconic neighborhoods. It stretches from 34th to 57th Street and 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. Back in the day, the New York Central freight trains ran along 10th and 11th Avenues, causing so many fatal accidents that 10th Avenue became known as Death Avenue. The city tried to prevent more injuries with horseback riders called West Side Cowboys who warned people of oncoming trains. But eventually, elevated tracks like the High Line replaced these dangerous street-level rails. This area, like many New York neighborhoods, has been home to different communities. Here's Lenny Sloan again.

Hell's Kitchen was first a Lenape Native American community and fishing community. African Americans replaced the Lenape Indians in Hell's Kitchen, and famine Irishmen replaced the African Americans.

In the 1840s, Hell's Kitchen was home to African American laborers who worked on the Croton Aqueduct, bringing water from Westchester to Manhattan. As the waterfront industrialized, Irish immigrants found jobs on the docks, in the slaughterhouses, factories, and on the railroads. Historian Miriam Nyhan Gray researches the intersections of race and ethnicity in the Irish diasporic experience. She says there were several areas in New York where Black and Irish communities were merging.

One of the early examples of this kind of Black-Irish mixing is down in the area of the Five Points. A bit later on, a little bit further north, we're seeing community there in the area that is now Soho. And then later on, we're seeing in the Hell's Kitchen area. As Manhattan evolves geographically over time, and the African American community tends to move northward.

We're seeing some evidence of these small Black Irish communities as well. I find kind of ironic is to think about the fact that in, say, for example, 1870 New York, it would not have been remarkable for someone to say, I'm mulatto and my mother is Irish and my father is African-American or Black. That wasn't unusual in the 19th century. And then somehow in the period in between that history of Black Irish mixing, A became less common and B actually was kind of suppressed in terms of our consciousness of identity.

During the Silk Road workshop in New York, being able to work with the Irish Arts Centre allowed us to investigate and create in the heart of one of these melting pot spaces, using that history in the workshop's musical performance.

The sound within me is a breath, the breath of a working man. The sounds of labor within him. Back, breaking labor.

Here's Kestrel Wolkometh of the Irish Arts Centre again.

Our audiences are really, really tied into Hell's Kitchen history, at least like our kind of local neighborhood audiences. So I think there was a recognition there of kind of the potency of doing this work in this location and that every night you could leave the building and kind of walk through the streets where a lot of this history had happened. The railroad made the world a smaller place. And I think art does that, too, in a lot of ways.

As Black and Irish communities developed near the railroad industry that relied on their labor, they forged a bond through the shared challenges of the work.

All right, all right, all right, just a little bit, just a half, big'em, there, little'em, there.

There were those people whose job it was to chop down trees or clear the land. Then there were those people who were required to break large boulders into little rocks to level. Then there were the guys called the gandhi men. And the gandhi men were section leaders. Each section laid a section of track. Eight men, the first four in pairs, pull the heavy iron rails up onto the broken rocks. Then two men come and lay down the wooden ties, connecting the rails together, which are called sleepers. The men who got the most publicity in folklore drove the spikes. And with each spike, the men pushed this five-foot pipe called the gandhi that pushed the two rails into alignment so that the spikes would go down correctly and the rails would connect. And then they started over eight feet away. And so they moved down the track in twos and fours. Their last action was all eight of them to push the last piece into alignment. And the movement of the men switching positions looked like a quadril or a square dance.

These laborers were called gandhi dancers because of the rhythmic movements Lenny describes. Lenny also says that it would not have been unusual for women to follow and support the men working along the tracks.

Women received very little for their participation, but did a great deal. Large granite rocks would be broken into small little chips, and women would collect baskets of those chips and carry them up the hill to men who used them to grade the trails. There was always something to boil, always something to hang up, always something to catch and slaughter, because the railroads usually gave you 25 pounds of flour, 25 pounds of cornmeal, and some pig lard and, you know, some potatoes.

While the New York Central continued to expand north and west, Grand Central Depot opened in Manhattan in 1871, bringing together several major rail lines in one terminal. At the same time, New York and Boston were competing to build the first subway in the U.S. Boston's, finished in 1897, was easier to dig since it mainly involved dirt and gravel, so they could use traditional tools. But in New York City, you had to blast through bedrock. Many Irish workers known as sand hogs handled the dangerous job of tunneling for railways and sewers.

often facing cave-ins and flooding. One major accident happened in 1903, when a tunnel collapsed at 42nd Street and 4th Avenue, killing several workers, many of them Irish. Under such grim conditions, work songs became one way that the workers could get the job done, to communicate with each other, and to keep each other safe. In the 1930s, the Library of Congress collected many train songs, and later, folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan recorded railroad workers demonstrating their Gandhi dances and work chants. Listen to these workers from a film in Alan Lomax's archive.

What did the hinduck say to the Drake? No more crawfish in this lake. Just dive outside. Dive outside. Dive outside. The songs are chants. The rhythms are always the same. The melodies are mostly the same. But the words change based upon, are you hauling the rail, or are you pushing the chips of rock, you know? Are you swinging the sledgehammer and driving the spike? It's dangerous work, because the unit had to be in perfect sync. And so you get these Gandhi dancers writing their own songs and adapting their own melodies. Sometimes it's to make joke of the master. Sometimes it's to make joke of the men who are ahead of you. Sometimes it's to tell the story of men who have fallen in this work and were buried along the roadside.

Some of these recordings are now at the Smithsonian, but you don't have to dig deep to find a railroad song.

I've been working on a railroad all the live-long days. I've been working on the railroad just to pass the time away. I've been working on the railroad, which is just, we all learn as children and as part of our, our juvenile experience, was actually a really important song about the different jobs on the railroad.

I don't know if the songs that came over from Ireland would have been necessarily work songs.

Historian Miriam Nyhan Gray notes that while Irish immigrants didn't bring a tradition of railroad tunes from their rural backgrounds, they influenced the tone and storytelling of this music

through folk songs they knew from back home. A lot of them would have been political songs that spoke to the relationship of Ireland as a colonized country and a colonized people. They would have celebrated aspects of Irish culture that for many centuries were under, I mean, threat is probably a mild word, where they're told that their culture is less than because it's not English, because it's not Anglicized. And this would have crossed the Atlantic with the Irish.

Drill ye terriers drill Well you work all day For the sugar in your tay Down behind the railway And drill ye terriers drill And blast and fire

So, Drill Ye Terriers is a song about, yes, we're going to push through no matter what you do to me, You can break my back But you can't break my Irish spirit

Drill ye terriers drill is a work song attributed to two men named Thomas Casey and Charles Connolly The lyrics often refer to the Irish workers' early hours and low pay, the meanness of the foreman, and an accidental explosion that sends a worker skyward.

Now our new foreman was Jim again By golly he was a blinking man Last week a premature blast went off And a mile in the sky went Big Jim Goff And drill ye terriers drill

The verses, the events along the railroad, And the resistance of the men, the conditions of their work would be overlaid in the actual task of drilling, hammering, pushing, shoveling. Drill Ye Terriers is another such song that sends one signal to the master, one signal to the casual listener, and another signal to those who are inside the code.

Once the railroad work was done for the day and the work songs fell silent, the musical exchange between the Irish and Black workers didn't end there. In the streets of New York neighborhoods and in the work camps along the New York Central Railroad, a bicultural stew of music and dance was bubbling.

It was very popular to sing four-part songs, and so singing around the fire.

fiddle competitions, impromptu jigs, Shanus, which is the loose dance, and jig and shuffle, which are the African dances. The Irish dance is a rising dance. It rebounds from the earth. It is reaching higher and higher with each leap. The Irish dance is trying to overcome gravity. The African dance is understanding and trying to get closer to the heart and the pulse, which is the earth. So this notion of trading dances, one-upping each other, was important to the work camps, as well as the trading of instruments. The largest trade that we've seen, cultural trade, is Africans in America picking up the fiddle and Irishmen in America picking up the banjo.

The ancestor of the modern-day banjo started out as a West African instrument, refined by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. The instrument represented a spiritual connection to their roots. For me, playing the banjo isn't just a musical tool. It's a symbol of reclaiming a history that's been forgotten or erased. And then you've got the fiddle, which came over from Europe and found its place in African American culture. Together, these two instruments, the fiddle and the banjo, became a perfect mix of African and Irish traditions that helped shape early American music. We'll be back with more of American Railroad in just a moment.

At night, the rails are mine. No one there to check my time. And so I dance.

After performing at our workshop at Irish Arts Centre, Silk Road Ensemble member Maeve Gilchrist set out to tap the history and spirit of the Irish railroad workers.

You know, I was born in Scotland, but my mother's Irish, and I've always felt very connected to this line of Irish immigrants, particularly Irish musicians that have come over from Ireland to America, particularly to the cities, New York, Chicago, Boston, and made such vibrant communities there. I started as a traditional musician with this awareness of traditional instrumentation from Scotland and Ireland. The pipes, the fiddles, the flutes, the clarsach, or the harp, of course. So it made sense that I start with a seed that was connected to the journey of an Irishman going over. And there is no more famous Irishman than Chief Francis O'Neill. Francis O'Neill was originally from County Cork, went over in the late 19th century, a great fiddle player, collector of music, and he eventually worked himself up to the chief of police in Chicago.

Chief Francis O'Neill gathered traditional Irish songs by either recording musicians on wax cylinders or having them transcribe their music. And as a police officer, he met a wide array of Irish immigrants. He compiled over a thousand tunes in a collection called The Dance Music of Ireland.

And I wanted to start with a tune or a fragment of a tune that was present in that collection. And I found one called The Far Down Farmer. Just a simple jig. I'll play just the very beginning for you. I was intrigued by the title, Far Down Farmer. I hadn't heard that term before. That was apparently used in reference at times. I think somewhat derogatorily to Irish workers from Ulster. It was demonstrative of the tension that existed at times even within immigrant groups and certainly between immigrant groups. The differences between the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant communities is nothing new. We all know of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Far Down, of course, is an Irish word referring to the dark men. So I just took it as a sign and a connection to the railway. This is a jig, of course. A jig is in 6-8 time. 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, or 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. And there's this kind of emphasis on the second and third, or the second to the third eighth notes. And even though we're tapping our foot on the downbeat, it's that second and third beat which create the buoyancy that brings us on to the next measure and the next.

and creates that forward-moving, train-like, hypnotic, circular groove. I wanted to reorder these notes and turn them into a fragment that I could use as the kind of first sentence of the character in this piece, Far Down Far. And that became this. One, two, three. One, two, three. That's the fragment that the whole beginning section of this piece, Far Down Far, is based on. And I'll often kind of start the whole thing with a demonstration of the original tune and then I'll morph into this landscape, which to me is the setting of a train station, a busy train station with people from all over, crossing paths, wandering by, running late for their train, picking up tickets, meeting loved ones, saying goodbye. And I start this vamp. It's this circular 12-8 vamp, which very much serves as a pad for each of the distinctive instrumental voices in Silk Road to bring in that beginning phrase. So we've got the train station. And then each voice comes in. Or maybe a different key. We have each of the instruments coming in and using their own kind of distinctive vocabulary to outline this same little phrase that was taken from Far Down Farmer.

As Maeve developed the tune for the Silk Road Ensemble, she created a new sound world to represent the railroads. She used the unique qualities of each musician's instrument and cultural background.

We've got this part that the pipa plays a lead in. It's quite humorous. It's just speeding up. And the whole ensemble kind of takes notice of this increase in tempo, and together the momentum gathers. Until we're launched out in this new time signature, which has elements of a reel. We've got this feeling of duple time. I'm counting the big two, but we're actually in 3-4. And through this point to the end of the piece, I'm constantly changing time signatures. And the reason I'm doing that is to create this forward sense of urgency. The train starts to accelerate. The people on board get closer to their destination. And this melody, to me, or to my ears, is an example of a tune that superficially has that levity, that gayness, in the traditional sense of the word. But there's also, there's this kind of a yearning underneath it. If I slowed it down.

Maeve says the story of the Irish people is embedded in a song like Far Down Farmer, and people often associate traditional Irish music with a sort of jolliness that belies the depth of that history.

We tap our foot along with the jigs and the reels of Irish music. But there is real sorrow in those notes. There's the history of a culture that's been tried to be eradicated by the English, and a language that's tried to be taken away from the people. Eradication of the very idea of Irishness. And I think when there is a sustained sadness, it can harden into anger, and through that anger it becomes a power. And I think that power is so apparent, even in these tunes, that can feel superficially full of...

of levity and joy. Lenny Sloan uses a story about Frederick Douglass to illustrate the connection between Irish and African-American music on a deeper, more spiritual level. Frederick Douglass escaped to Ireland in 1845 after publishing his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Fearing capture and re-enslavement because of the book's success, he disguised himself as a sailor and carried forged identification papers. He made his way to the British Isles.

Frederick Douglass gets to Ireland and he's walking through the streets as a free man and he hears this music and he swears that it's the blues. He's hearing these Irish keeners wailing and singing and he says, my heart opened up. He was so struck that the sound of the Irish music sounded the same as the wailing in the Carolina rice fields. The sounds in Savannah, the sounds in Boston, the sounds in Philadelphia, the sounds in Hell's Kitchen, in five corners of the Irish, mourning about their lot in life and the sounds of the tobacco workers and the cane workers and the cotton fields. And so too did Irishmen find in the songs of the people who they were sent to despise. They found some sense of harmony and humanity in the open heart of blues music. I believe when you hear somebody else's tears, it washes away some of the fears.

Next time on American Railroad, we're heading to California to learn about the immigrants who constructed the western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad and only recently received credit.

The Transcontinental Railroad itself was celebrated multiple times on anniversaries, the 50th, the 100th, the 150th anniversaries. But in the first several anniversaries, zero mention of Chinese.

American Railroad is a production of Silk Road and PRX. The show is produced by Amber Walker, David Newtown, and Perry Gregory, and edited by Genevieve Sponsler and Jocelyn Gonzalez, executive producer of PRX Productions. Our mix engineer is Tommy Bazarian, and our project manager is Tony Carlson. Our recording engineers are Ben Rollins and Jacob Wolfe at the University of Limerick. Special thanks to Patrick Grant for additional sound mixing, and to Glucksman Ireland House at NYU. For more on Silk Road's American Railroad project, including our tour and album, go to silkroad.org. I'm Rhiannon Giddens. See you at the next stop.