This question has been bugging me since I watched part of a show about some fiddle player on PBS last night.
My grandmother, a pretty good musician who played many instruments, pronounced piano as pah-no. I never heard anyone else say it that way, but she did. She hailed from Michigan, if that explains it. 
Her ancestors were French
Any ideas where she might have picked up the pronunciation? Some kind of affectation, maybe? She also said “couch” funny. Sounded kinda like “divan”.
Peace,
mangeorge
I’ve never heard it said that way. It’s an Italian word, not French; I wasn’t sure if you thought that might be why she pronounced it that way. She didn’t pronounce the “i” at all?
Dad, from Marion, Indiana said pi-ann-o.
Mom, from southern Ohio, said pi-ow-no.
I, in middle Indiana, say pi-ann-o.
Many folks in these parts say pi-anna.
No, no “i” at all. I thought maybe the French pronunciation was something like that.
Any Cajun folks? Her parents were from Lousianna, IIRC, and she was into witchcraft when she was younger.
Who knows. Sade (the jazz singer) = Sharday? I can believe just about anything.
I’ve only heard it pronounced “pee-ann-o”.
Except in the Old West, where it’s “pie-annie”. 
Only ever pi-an-o
And I really hate people who try to Italianate(?) it as pi-ahhhhh-no
Re: “pah-no”.
I’m just guessing; but I think maybe some people, not being well educated, used to say “pie-annuh”. I can see a regionalism developing where the long-I is dropped. “Pie-annuh”, “pah-annuh”, “pah-nuh”, “pah-no”.
All of my uncles and my father said “pie-annuh.” They were average educated all of them having finished the 8[sup]th[/sup] grade which was about normal for boys in the late 1800’s in the farm country of Iowa.
This is just a stab at it, mangeorge, but could it be that it was a pronunciation of piano with an accent (common in some southern accents) that pays but a slight genuflect to the multiple syllables, so slight that an ear unaccustomed to that accent might miss the accent’s acknowledgement of the syllabic flexure (is that last construction in English?)? I’ll offer as an example a fellow I had many telephone dealings with for a couple of years, a petroleum engineer from South Texas.
I knew him as he’d introduced himself, as Dale Weems. When we finally met he gave me his business card, and I learned that his name was Darrel Williams.
Just a WAG.
My husband, a smart guy from West Virginia, pronounces pee-AN-o correctly but used to say EYE-talian and IN-surance which made me cringe every time.
I got him to stop using EYE-talian with ridicule but haven’t had any luck getting him to change from IN-surance to in-SUR-ance.
I guess these are just regional variations but they make my husband sound like an uneducated Appalacian. 
As for divan; my grandmother also used it when referring to a couch. It’s an anacronism from their age group as far as I can tell. (Sort of like saying icebox for refridgerator.)
Sorry. Still have some sleep deprivation from the weekend. My post was poorly put. What I meant was that when “pie-annuh” came about, there were no radios, telephones, televisions, etc. Information was transfered over long distances in print. When confronted with a word of foreign origin, people had to do the best they could without having heard the correct pronunciation and usually without the benefit of foreign language education. So the “ee” became “ai”. The “uh”, I think, comes from regional accents; like “-ing” becomes “-in”, for example. (BTW, there’s a very funny Monty Python sketch involving “'oop” versus “hoop”. “Oh! I have an “Hoop”! No more buttered scones for me, Mater; I’m off to play the grand piano!”)
It’s really Shah-day. The ‘r’ made it in there when Brit types were writing down the pronunciation, and since they don’t say syllable-final Rs, it worked out for them. Americans pronouncing it with an ‘r’ sound are screwing it up.
Same British shortsightedness that led to the common spelling of the Korean name Pak (or is it Paak?) as “Park”. And the Thai king Chulalongkorn. No ‘r’ sound there either.
Mangeorge was talking about how the singer Sade prounounces her name. She actually pronounces it “char-Day”.
Yeah, so was I. I must confess I’ve never heard her pronounce it, but I’m familiar with seeing it specified as “Shar-day” in print, and I recently read that this is inaccurate, and it’s a spelling originally done for the benefit of Brits, who of course would read “Shar-day” approximately the way an American would read “Shah-day”. There apparently isn’t an “r” sound, and it’s just transcribed badly.
Am I incorrect here? I’m basically repeating what I’ve read elsewhere. But I stand by my statement that Koreans do not pronounce the name “Park” the way it’s spelled.
No reason to be sorry. I wasn’t complaining about the “uneducated” bit at all. It just seemed to me that pie-annah (pretty much unaccented) must have been a common pronunciation in their part of the country and elsewhere at that time.
I think Johnny L.A., and others, might have something. A combination of her softening the “i” and burying it in the rest of the word, us kids exagerating her accent, and the effect of 50 years on my memory could explain my recolection.
As for Sade, I saw a concert on PBS, and she was introduced as Sharday.
Lady’s got some pipes, I must say.