University of Alabama history professor John Beeler says he isn’t aware of a direct correlation, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.Īt a time when Black Lives Matter protests have sparked a scrubbing or contextualizing of campuses’ Confederate iconography, many universities south of the Mason-Dixon line are now grappling with school traditions more subtle than larger-than-life Robert E Lee statues or “stars-and-bars” rebel flags. “Roll Alabama Roll” definitely inspired “Roll Tide”, says Joe Ringhoffer, a former commander of the Semmes Camp 11 of the SCV. They’re the century-old nonprofit group responsible for funding the construction of hundreds of Confederate memorials all over the south. Yes, according to the Alabama Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Is it just a coincidence that the university’s fight song “Yea Alabama” calls for “Dixie’s football pride” to send Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets “to a watery grave?” Does the “Roll Tide Roll” rallying cry come from “Roll Alabama Roll?” That one-on-one skirmish is the most famous naval battle in Civil War history and is immortalized in a French impressionist Manet painting. It’s a late 19th-century song – an elegy of sorts – that mourns the sinking of the Alabama, a Confederate raiding ship, by the Union warship Kearsarge. There’s some circumstantial evidence to suggest that it was adapted from an old sea shanty called “Roll Alabama Roll”. The history of the phrase, as well as the creation myth behind the Crimson Tide’s nickname, is murky at best. But it may also have forgotten Confederate origins.
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