I founs some info on the African-american connection from gandy dancers John Mealing and Cornelius Wright, Jr.

The term gandy dancers comes from the Chicago-based Gandy Manufacturing Company, maker of railroad tools, and the "dancing" movements of the workers using them. Teams of eight to 14 men worked together to lay or care for the tracks of southern railroads. They had a rich repertoire of songs used for the many tasks required of them; songs, in the poetic words of folklorist Alan Lomax, that "sounded so wild and sweet that the mockingbirds in the nearby bushes stopped to listen, [as the] railroad moved into the Southern wilderness."

Judging from the scant historical record we have of railroad chants dating back to John Lomax and Herbert Halpert's recordings in the 1930s, it is clear that certain couplets have remained strong in the oral tradition of railroad laborers. Such verses include those about the foreman's incompetence:

Captain can't read, Captain can't write
How can we tell which track is right?
If I'd know'd my captain was blind,
Wouldn't went to work 'til half past nine.

Oh boys over yonder (4 times)

There are riddle calls, and calls about making and losing money:

When I was working for the L&N,
Made good money but I blowed it in.

Since the caller was never sure when the call had to stop, there was generally no narrative logic to the sequence of his calls. A verse recalling a biblical figure of the past is followed by several about women of the present:

If I could I surely would,
Stand on the rock where Moses stood.
If I could (rap it, rap it!)
I surely would, Stand on the rock,
Where Moses stood.

I don't know but I've been told,
Susie had a jelly roll.
I don't know
But I've been told,
That Susie had,
A jelly roll.

Ida Red and Ida Blue,
got a gal named Ida too.
Oh boys over yonder (6 x)

-Richie