One more vote for Sling Blade as the best and most easily accessible movie for Southern accents. The Arkansas semi-rural accents match pretty well with semi-rural accents in Alabama, Tennessee, and the other Deep South states I have visited. I stress semi-rural because the inflections get a bit more refined and “magnolia” as you move to larger communities. And deeply rural accents are closest to the stereotypical “Southern accent” you hear all the way from Hee Haw to the latest wannabe “actor” trying to sound Southern.
The actor playing the little boy (Lucas Black) is from Alabama and has refused to take roles where he has to change his accent. That’s what I call authentic. You could look for some of his other films; he’s rather prolific for someone his age.
I lived my first 18 years in Central Alabama, if you need my credentials.
I was pretty impressed with Albert Finney’s accent in Big Fish (especially for an Englishman). I’m not from Alabama, but my folks are, and when he’d speak I’d think “OMG, my dad!”
There are many different Alabama accents so it depends largely on social class.
One that I liked a lot from a non-Alabamian playing an Alabamian was Fred Gwynne as the judge in My Cousin Vinnie. He sounded just like my father!
The movie Sordid Lives has some great southern accents, and a couple of its cast members (female) are Alabamian (most notably Beth Grant who plays the Aunt who is “tryin’ to quit smokin’!”
I think it may be obvious from the replies in this thread that even among Southerners there are varieties of the “Southern accent” that annoy and please an individual, and I’d stretch that to include any individual. Each of us has an ear for “authentic” versus “exaggerated” versus “just plain wrong” and not just for Southern, but for any regional accent you could name.
If I were to present recordings of the members of my parents’ generation you’d find a wide range among them but even then a wholly different “average sound” from the generation I and my cousins are from as well as the one for my kids and grandkids. And, for the most part, we’re more “citified” than the semi-rural group I alluded to before.
It may well be that your objective might be to settle on a “class” of Alabamian you’re wanting to portray and then focus on that subset of accents. Playing a Montgomery politician or lawyer as if he or she were straight off a peanut farm would be worse than having him or her sound like he or she came from Boston (and there are more than a few similarities between Alabama and New England speakers).
Getting an Auburn graduate who’s never been out of the state to sound “Southern” could be a much more subtle task than getting a Hollywoodized Georgian or Tennesseean or even Kentuckian to sound like “your basic Alabamian.” And if there’s a more authentic Alabama sound than an Auburn graduate, I challenge you to produce it.
I agree. And if you can locate any Brother Dave Gardner comedy recordings, you’ll hear what a Southern Beatnik/Preacher should sound like. Just kidding, but Bro Dave was as Southern and proud of it as anybody before Billy Bob Thornton.
For a midlands South Carolina / North Carolina accent, Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder will knock your socks off. It took me halfway through the movie to hear that he was doing an accent at all, because he sounded like me. That’s not Alabama, though, but you did say Southern accent in general.
I tend to agree with that. You’ve got all of Tennessee to go through to get Kentucky to sound like Alabama, and there’s a huge variety even in Tennessee that’s not really Alabama. Folks like me who have been both places for extended stays would spot the differences right away.
What’s really fun is to get folks in the same state arguing why others in the same state don’t talk right. East Tennessee, for example.
And folks in South Alabama tend to think of North Alabama as Yankees. I kid you not!
We have many different situations in the show, but it essentially focuses on two brothers and a sister who are the local ‘barons’ of a small town in Alabama in the early 1900’s. So, unlike ‘My Fair Lady’/‘Pygmalion’ (where you can get away with an inconsistency of accents because everyone is supposed to be from a slightly different place and Henry Higgens notices the variance in dialect.) if the Hubbard family have slightly different accents, they’re not as believable. We need a dignified, stately Alabama accent which is not aristocratic (Ben Hubbard makes a great point of his family background which is in trade “We are not aristocrats, sir!”) and, ideally, is accurate.
Given your description, I’d recommend getting Ken Burns’s Civil War some way and focusing on Shelby Foote’s accent. Yes, he’s not an Alabamian, but his smooth-as-silk, dignified, educated, cultured way with the language is breath-taking. Others have that suave manner, and Cultured Alabamians do, too.
His accent in The Apostle was one of the best I’ve ever heard from a non-southerner. I’ve known a lot of older southern men (especially in the country) who sound a lot like that.
He’s Tennessean/Mississippian rather than Alabamian, but I love Shelby Foote’s accent. (He was the historian interviewed on Ken Burns The Civil War.) It’s an upper-crust accent you don’t hear much anymore (which is another point- the southern accent is largely receding; if you heard me or Ogre or most of our friends who are native Alabamians/multigenerational southerners speak you would not realize we were multigenerational southerners).
Another “worst” movie for southern accents is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Spacey’s was decent- the slightly effeminate aristocratic accent (his character wasn’t really aristocratic but he had the ‘heirs’ of one) but most of the other actors playing Georgians were dreadful and you would think they would have learned from the real Georgians on the set how off the mark they were.
Speaking of Slingblade, Lucas Black (the kid) used his real voice and as mentioned above he’s from north Alabama. I later saw him as Helen’s brother in The Miracle Worker and he had a ridiculously affected drawl, especially since he was playing a North Alabamian; no idea why they felt it was necessary to coach him.
We’re in a funny historic spot, though. We have enough rural Southern roots that we’re perfectly aware of what is and isn’t culturally authentic, but we’re “modern American” enough to have been influenced by popular culture (and education) at large. As such, we can pretty much all turn our Southern accents on and off like a switch. IMHO, it’s a fascinating code-shifting phenomenon.
PS- Just noticed Shelby Foote had already been mentioned; should have hit refresh before posting. Sorry. :smack:
Speaking of Shelby, it’s ironic since he is the ultimate southern gentleman historian and devoted his life to study of the civil war that his mother was not only from NYC but the daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants who came to the U.S. after the Civil War and to Tennessee long after that. He mentioned in some interviews that several members of his mother’s family still had thick German accents when he was growing up.
A sort of diglossia. I don’t know about you and you’rn, but an oddity I’ve noticed is that my natural southern accent tends to get a bit deeper when I’m outside the south, and it’s not just me. When Arroway (or Earl or whatever the hell I’m calling him on the board at the moment) went to D.C. last year he made me double over in a diner somewhere in Virginia when he ordered, completely unintentionally, scrambled eggs and grrriiiiiits, a word he never drawls at home.
My friend Jessica says that anytime I say the vowel sound you’d find in ‘on’ that I drawl it. She says I’ll be essentially “accentless” other than for that and it’ll come out as “Could you see if I left my book ooonnn the dresser?”