Roll, Alabama, Roll
traditional sea shanty
"Roll, Alabama, Roll" (Roud 4710) is an American-British sea shanty of the nineteenth century. It is based on the exploits of the CSS Alabama, a sloop-of-war of the Confederate States Navy which enjoyed success as a commerce raider against Union shipping during the American Civil War.
The lyrics describe the ship from its construction by John Laird of Merseyside until its sinking at the Battle of Cherbourg in June 1864. The words were set to the melody of the older song "Roll the Cotton Down" which originated amongst black longshoremen in southern ports of the United States.
References
Bibliography
Irwin Silber & Jerry Silverman. Songs of the Civil War. Courier Corporation, 1995.
The public source identifies “Roll, Alabama, Roll” as traditional sea shanty. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Roll, Alabama and traditional.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104842646. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roll, Alabama, Roll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.