I've Been Working on the Railroad

The story

"I've Been Working on the Railroad" is an American folk song. Its first published version appeared as "Levee Song" in Carmina Princetonia, a book of Princeton University songs, in 1894, and its earliest known recording was made by the Shannon Quartet, released by Victor Records in 1923. The melody of its opening line may have been inspired by the very similar opening of the cello solo, about a minute into Franz von Suppé's Poet and Peasant overture of 1846.

The 1894 "Levee Song" has one verse very like the song sung today, but written in the dialect of the minstrel stage, with an introduction no longer sung and a quite different second verse that uses a racial slur. The song is a patchwork. Its "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah" section, with a noticeably different melody, is an older song it absorbed, published in London in the 1830s or 1840s as "Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah", with music credited to J. H. Cave; the tune of that section may have been adapted from "Goodnight, Ladies", written as "Farewell Ladies" by E. P. Christy in 1847. "Dinah", the name of an abducted woman in the biblical book of Genesis, had become a generic name for an enslaved woman and, by extension, for any woman of African-American descent. The "Dinah, won't you blow" section is a more recent addition, made, according to the liner notes of Pete Seeger's Children's Concert at Town Hall (1963), by "some college students".

Further verses have been sung and printed, among them a verse that follows the "fiddly-i-o" refrain and, in The Family Car Songbook edited by Tam Mossman, verses on driving spikes on a trestle, on living as a hobo in boxcars, and on a worker's dream of one day owning the railroad. Its tune also carries other words: "The Eyes of Texas", the spirit song of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso, was written to it in 1904 and is sung by students, staff and alumni at Longhorn games and other events.

What it says

A work song in the voice of a railroad labourer who has worked on the line all day long, hears the whistle blow and the captain shouting for Dinah to blow her horn. It then turns, with a new tune, into a merry older verse about someone in the kitchen with Dinah, strumming the banjo. The modern song is cheerful and easy to sing; its 1894 form carried the racist caricature of the minstrel show.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.