I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, there’s a 2013 Stack Exchange post about it; most of the suggested answers are guesswork and contradictory, but there’s one that cites the OED:
The OED says it’s US slang originally in the language of rap and hip-hop. It’s sense VII.36.f. (and sense VII.36.e. is “Let’s roll”), under sense VII:
To move or convey on wheels or rollers, and related senses.
This is their first quotation of the phrase:
1991 ‘Hammer’ & F. Pilate (song title), This is the way we roll.
So I checked the OED, which does indeed have it as sense VII.36.f.:
intransitive. U.S. slang (originally in the language of rap and hip-hop). To act, behave (in a certain way). Frequently in that’s how (also the way) I (we, etc.) roll.
But it’s not clear to me that they’re deriving it directly from the sense “To move or convey on wheels or rollers,” and when I checked Green’s I found 4 (f) “in fig. use, to exist, to conduct one’s life”:
1972 [US] R. Kahn Boys of Summer 297: My younger brother Roy [. . .] had good ability, but he was too hardheaded. He had to roll separate.
2007 [US] UGK ‘Int’l Player’s Anthem’ 🎵 Baby you been rollin’ solo, time to get down with the team.
2016 [US] T. Robinson Rough Trade [ebook] ‘We don’t know how Byron rolls’.
2021 [US] J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 237: ‘No heavy petting, Janey. I don’t roll in that direction’.
But there’s also 6 (b) “(US black) to survive, to live, to conduct oneself” (first cite 1988 [US] Ice-T ‘Heartbeat’ 🎵 Just rollin’ thick as hell, champagne I sip as well); why is that a different sense? And how far back does it date? One of the Stack Exchange commenters says:
I was born in 1968, and my family and community in San Diego regularly used the term “cause that’s just how we roll” and variations. My father, Black and Chippewa, and spoke Spanish, was born in 1916 and was raised in Los Angeles. He was originally from Texas. But the phrase has been around a long long time. I believe it’s from Black slang.
Which makes sense to me; I’m pretty sure it predates hiphop. Anyway, what do y’all think?
I was certainly surprised at the idea that it only appeared with hip-hop. If this is actually true, I’m suffering from whatever the opposite of the Recency Ilusion is.
I expect it to be at least as old as “rock and”.
But “that’s how I roll” doesn’t have to make more sense than “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”…
i agree with DM – and i’d extend it past the fixed phrase “rock and roll” to the pairing of the two in their sexual-euphemism sense, which goes back to at least the 1920s (trixie smith, recorded in 1922: “my daddy rocks me / with one steady roll”).
i think that dual extended sense of “roll” runs basically parallel to the similarly combined sexual/mode-of-living sense of “do” (e.g. dean johnson “just because i let you do me / doesn’t mean you know how to dance”; montell jordan “this is how we do it / south central does it like nobody does”).
in a more absolute sense, my handwavy guess would be that it’s from late-19thC african american english, migrating into white usage starting in the late 1910s – with a possibility of earlier use in multiracial nautical contexts.
There’s the phrase made famous by one of the Flight 93 heroes of 9/11, which I think is probably related to “how we roll” in some way, but has a more immediate connotation: “Let’s roll”
It’s not “let’s live our lives” but more like let’s move into action / let’s do this thing.
In theory, I might expect that Let’s roll out (i.e., get this actual convoy of trucks moving) evolved into Let’s roll (ie, just get whatever project or task underway ) and finally into How we roll (the “project” is abstracted so far as to take in one’s whole way of living.) But I don’t know that there’s any history behind Let’s roll prior to 9/11.
(Acknowledging I didn’t initially notice that let’s roll was already cited in a parenthesis in the original post, but I’m leaving this up because I think it provides a plausible path from other meanings of roll.)
“Let’s roll,” for, “Let’s get moving and to work,” is decades old. I’ve known it all my life, and it didn’t feel like a new, slangy usage when I was a kid.
The ngram for how we roll is extraordinary – it basically occurred in print for a few years in the 1850s and never again till this millennium.
For some reason, the ngram viewer has a problem with lets roll out, with or without apostrophe. The issue doesn’t seem to be three words, since how we roll worked, nor lets/let’s since lets roll worked.
Oh yes, I forgot about that.
So maybe the original meaning of “let’s roll” was “on les nique tous ! On nique leur race.”
I have always considered it to be a dialed down and diluted version of “rock and roll”.
Here’s the earliest reference to rock and roll that I could find. The YouTube says the recording is 1938 but apparently this sexualized usage goes back to the early 1920s.
https://youtu.be/PvzmBA91P3c?si=PXYdru_LwKj4uK9a
But I think your reference is correct that hip hop usage gave it a major boost in the ’90s, also broadening its meaning.
It seems to get used a fair bit in 19th century sailor songs, with more than one meaning, maybe.
(Dated to the 1830s)
There were many black sailors in the sailing ship days, both Americans and West Indians.
And in the 1941 song Roll On, Columbia, Roll On by that shill for hydropower, Woody Guthrie.
There are two transportation senses of roll that may be bleeding into one another. We can have roll meaning “travel on rotating wheels,” and there is also is the “sway or pitch up and down [as a vessel] on the water” meaning.
@Y: The meaning of a river “rolling” may or may not be closely related. Rivers don’t have the large waves that are responsible for rolling boats on the open sea, but the analogy is still obviously there.
Although we sang “Roll On, Columbia,” in elementary school music class in Oregon, I think that’s one of the weakest songs that Woody wrote for the Bonneville Power Administration. “Grand Coulee Dam” and “End of the Line” are much better. (The title of the latter is a double entendre, referring to both the standard expression “end of the line” and to the end of power distributions lines.)
There’s also “roll it” in movie lingo, which could be associated with the others, mentally if not etymologically.
Noteworthy evidence for the expansion of the “how I roll” phrase beyond core AAVE speakers: https://www.eoinbutler.com/tag/thats-how-i-roll-this-is-funny/
Within AAVEish or rap-adjacent uses, I wonder if there’s a connection with “pimp roll,” glossed by the New Partridge Dict. of Slang & Unconventional Eng. in rather classical terms as “a highly stylised manner of walking, projecting an image of control and dispassion.” (First attestation dated 1970, although that’s a misreading of the source and should be ’71.*)
Green’s has an instance of “let’s roll” from 1960 (from a pulpy “dirty novel”) that seems to mean exactly what you would expect it to mean now – i.e. freely interchangeable with “let’s go.”
*And that’s “so-called ‘pimp roll,'” from which I infer that the writer is presenting this** as a well-established locution in a relevant dialect or specialized jargon he doesn’t expect his readers to have prior familiarity with.
**Although of course cynics might wonder whether it was the writer’s own coinage being passed off as authentically vernacular.
So the pimp roll is different from the sailor’s roll, which I would not particularly associate with control, more like “Hey, the deck is not moving up and down. What’s wrong?”.
There’s the 1934 play “Merrily We Roll Along”
more grist:
the sea song Rolling Down To Old Maui, which i know from stan rogers’ version, apparently dates back to the 1850s. it seems like a possible middle stage between the descriptive transportation sense and the expanded way-of-living sense, since it’s basically an extended explanation of “how we [whalermen] roll” with a chorus about “rolling” southwards.
that (along with the songs maidhc cited) makes the idea of a progression from nautical usage to black vernacular to widespread idiom seem pretty plausible to me. and i wonder whether that mid-19thC spike in the ngram is from a few widely reprinted nautical adventure stories, or sets of sailors’ songs.
Makes sense!
The “riverine” sense of roll (used by Woody Guthrie as noted above) was extant among black slaves in the American South prior to 1860, as witness the proto-gospel song “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” Which was not, I think a usage opaque to whites of the time.
I take it that in that usage it’s the river itself that’s doing the rolling, so the “rollin’ on the river” bit in “Proud Mary” (written 1968, or perhaps ’67) is something else.
I always figured “rollin’ on the river” implied a paddle steamer.
Me too.
Goodnight Ladies
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goodnight_Ladies_in_Finding_His_Voice_(1929).webm
Whatever or whoever is rollin’ on the river, it ain’t the river itself. Rivers themselves, of course, still continued to roll. From a song a few years after “Proud Mary”:
“There’s a red moon rising
On the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake”
(I don’t think it’s the moon that’s rolling, although I guess you could read it that way if you wanted to …)
The Google Books hits I get for “how we roll” in the 1850s are from three copies of a poem by James Hogg with the line “How we roll’d the ponderous snowballs”.
(Not by Hogg but by someone named Wauchope, who I haven’t found anything else about.)
Wikipedia:
The Surname of Wauchope
JWB: The “riverine” sense of roll (used by Woody Guthrie as noted above) was extant among black slaves in the American South prior to 1860, as witness the proto-gospel song “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” Which was not, I think a usage opaque to whites of the time.
Much later, of course, but probably meant to reflect historical black usage: Ol’ man river from Show Boat (1927). The riverboat traffic seems like a plausible semantic path between the inland south and the open seas.
More “riverine” usage in song lyrics: “Won’t you batten* down by Baton Rouge, river queen, roll [it] on.” From the Johnny Cash composition “Big River,” originally recorded 1958. When Cash himself sings it there’s generally an audible “it,” but in the many versions from the 1970’s performed by the Grateful Dead, Bobby Weir consistently omits the “it.” Probably not a conscious edit, just Bobby having learned the words by ear and saying something that made more semantic/syntactic sense to him than what Cash had actually sung. Which of course makes me wonder what if any difference in actual meaning-in-context does the presence/absence of the “it” cause? What is the antecedent of the “it”? Or is it just an extremely impersonal/low-content/dummy-adjacent “it” like the it of e.g. (some uses of) “give it up”?
*Verb maybe relevant to another current thread …
I personally have no idea what “roll it on” might mean.
“that’s how I roll” in context
Wauchope: For some time I assumed that the walk-up pronunciation of Wauchope in the Northern Territory was a spelling pronunciation, and that the -hope for the town in NSW preserved the pronunciation of whatever it was named for. Apparently not.
Further informal/subconscious corpus research in the large-but-haphazard corpus of song lyrics in my brain turned up a perhaps-somewhat-unusual usage in the lines
“Going to leave this brokedown palace
On my hands and my knees, I will roll, roll, roll”
However many different modes of travel, movement, and locomotion are covered by various now-standard senses of “roll,” I’m not sure that crawling on ones hands and knees is very close to the core sense of any of them. Although perhaps the narrator if asked what he was doing on his hands and knees could just say “that’s how I roll”? It’s certainly possible that the lyricist was being intentionally cryptic or paradoxical in the service of being “poetic.” NB that that same “roll, roll, roll” pops up again in a later verse, but that time rather boringly it’s the river that’s roll-roll-rolling, as rivers are stereotypically wont to do.
Also Kipling’s verse from the ‘Just So Stories’ – ‘Rolling down to Rio’ https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_amazon.htm