Thanks, aruvqan. Actually, since I posted that, a few items from Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers (sometimes spelled Likkers) have appeared on YouTube. Here they are performing Cotton Baggin’, with a spoken word introduction delivered in a 1920s drawl that still sounds current. (Though I do notice that the speaker almost says “woids” for “words,” a habit that has since mostly dropped out of Southern speech.)
Let’s remember that there is no such thing as a Southern accent – there are a broad range of accents.
First, Washington was born a patrician, in northern Virginia. His older brother was a crony of Lord Fairfax and his agents. Second, as Captain Carrot has noted in other threads, Nrthern Virginia is today an entity unto itself – not truly a part of the South. While it’s impossible to know what it was like 250 years back, I suspect the regional accent would be much more like today’s rural Maryland than stereotypical Southern plains (think Scarlett O’Hara or Rue McClanahan’s Blanche). My hunch, founded on nothing more than a sense of historical class consciousness, is that the Washingtons, Fairfaxes, etc., would have spoken such an accent with a pronounced ‘British’ overlay – meaning, of course, R.P., not British regionalisms.
Andy Jackson, by contrast, would probably have had a distinct Appalachian accent – think “country singer” speech. The Waxhaws area (where Jackson was born and raised) and the surrounding counties have transitioned from a modified “Southern mountains” accent to a modified “Southern plains” accent within living memory.
And even within such groupings, there are clear subregional breakouts. Someone with a ‘pure’ Eastern North Carolina accent sounds like a native of Daown East Maine trying to portray a Suth’n’uh, far different from either Tidewater Virginia or Low Country South Carolina (which are themselves distinct). And they in turn differ from the Deep South accent of Alabama or Mississippi, the Cajun-spiced Louisiana speech, or the indescribable mix of East Texas. Likewise, it’s easy to tell a Cincinnati/Covington native from someone from the Virginia mountains or from popints further south. (And Cincinnati sounds much more like an Appalachian-Cornbelt cross than it does like typical Standard American speech from further north in Ohio or northwest in Indiana.)
…but still, the concept of a “southern accent” is not unscientific. There is of course a continuum of accents, but with little effort you can understand that Bill Clinton and George Bush have southern accents and that Giuliani doesn’t.
I think that a person born in Virginia to an upper-class family in the mid 18th century would have an accent that people would clasify in the (broad) category of “southern accent” even if it didn’y match what you’d expect today from the same kind of person.
in the same way that to speak of a “northern accent” in England is a way of showing certain generally-present characteristics.
I have the Harry Smith collection, best money I ever spent, and most of my monthly emusic allotment ends up getting used on folkways records =)
I love the old music, the voices may not be studio perfect…but priceless.
If you want more fun, there is a podcast that used to be on Itunes about Moe Asche and Folkways Records that originally got me hooked, they play entire pieces in the podcasts, there are 24 podcasts =)
It might be instructive to learn how quickly a distinctive Australian accent developed (and, as it’s comparatively recent history, far easier). This might give a clue as to how rapidly colonial accents develop.
All the evidence is that accents develop quite quickly.
One can see from those dates just how quickly an Australian accent developed and my feeling is that it would have been much the same with the American colonies.
The oldest deliberate sound recording of the human voice is 1860. A guy named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville worked out a way of transcribing sounds into squiggles on paper some 20 years before Edison developed the phonograph. He had no means of playback. In modern times, his paper recordings have been transcribed and played back. They give whole new meanings to the term “low fidelity”, although they definitely count as sound recordings made long before the Edison phonograph:
Scott de Martinville was born in 1817, so he was earlier by a few years than Florence Nightingale. If his device was being used to make traceries circa 1860, it’s possible that somebody born earlier than that was recorded, perhaps even somebody born in the late 18th century.
Generation jumping can be a fascinating thing. I am only 36 years old yet my great-grandmother was born in 1889 and I new her pretty well as a child. She had a strong Southern accent and almost certainly encountered people that were alive in the 1700’s. I never heard a comment on a substantial change of accent from her.
So there is every reason to think the accents in the Americas would have become distinctive from the English accent early on – within one generation in fact.
Polycarp, you are right that there are multiple Southern accents (though I think the dividing lines are more according to social class than to geography in most cases), but Southern accents all have certain common features that allow us to identify an accent as “Southern” even if we can’t pinpoint where the speaker is from.
My hunch is that the difference between the (broadly-defined) “Southern” mode of speech and the “Northern” mode of speech can trace its roots to the separate early development of the Virginia colony and the Massachusetts colony. In the parlance of the linguist I cited above, these colonies were the “Island A” and “Island B” of English-speaking America.