Responding to a message from Ross Campbell:

Good grief! You mean I have to pay attention to Mudcat threads again? Yes, ever since I first read Joanne Colcord's sea shanty book Roll & Go, back in the Pleistocene, and heard Bill Bonyun's tribute recording to that book, I've wondered about the meaning of the term.

Stan Hugil's does explain the term somewhere in Shanties of the Seven Seas as describing what a team of sailors doing a long haul of a line does when they run out of room to haul. Those at the end of the line peal off and head back to the front end and continue hauling on the line. They "roll and go." My group Roll & Go convincingly demonstrated that technique abourd the Charles W. Morgan one year at the Mystic Sea Music Festival. "Watch Roll & Go roll and go!"

As a sea music group Roll & Go members always delight in hearing references to ourselves embedded in shanties as lead by other groups. We describe that as "product placement."

Cheerily,
Charley Noble