Cylindrical shells composed of concentric layers may be designed to affect the way that elastic waves are generated and propagated, particularly when some layers are anisotropic. To aid the design process, the present work develops a wave based analysis of the Green's function for a layered cylindrical shell in which the response is given as a sum of waves propagating in the axial coordinate. The analysis assumes linear Hookean materials for each layer. It uses finite element discretizations in the radial coordinate and Fourier series expansions in the circumferential coordinate, leading to linear equations in the axial wavenumber domain that relate shell displacements and forces. Inversion to the axial domain is accomplished via a state-space formulation that is evaluated using residue integration. The resulting expression for the Green's function for each circumferential harmonic is a summation over the natural waves of the shell. The finite element discretization in the radial direction allows the approach to be used for arbitrarily thick shells. The approach is benchmarked to results from an isotropic shell and numerical examples are given for a shell composed of a fiber-reinforced material. The numerical examples illustrate the effect of fiber orientation on the Green's function.