Summary: The free vibration of a simply supported, transversely isotropic cylindrical shell filled with compressible fluid is exactly analyzed based on three-dimensional elasticity. We employ the displacement separation technique as well as the orthogonal series expansion method. Bessel functions with complex arguments are directly used for the determination of complex eigenvalues, and frequency equation of the coupled vibration problem is obtained by taking into account the effect of the inner fluid. Numerical results are presented and compared with those based on three typical shell theories.