I don’t listen to Country, and it’s been much easier to avoid since I left the Midwest, so I may be making some sweeping generalizations here. I’m curious, is the accent typically heard in Coutnry music from any particular region? Does it differ from male or female singers? Are the accents you hear the native accent of the singer, or is there a kind of standard accent that must be affected by anyone who wants to be successful? If it tends to be the latter, is that an authentic regional accent, or has it become more of a stylistic convention?
Are you suggesting there’s some kind of homogenized country singing accent, the way that most of the British Invasion singers were said to “sound American” when they sang rock and roll, but British (not surprisingly) when they spoke? If so, I don’t have a discerning enough ear to detect it in country music, but I think in general singing tends to flatten most accents–i.e., the act of articulating while singing notes removes some of the idiosyncrasies (but certainly not all, and to a different extent for different people). Just my opinion.
If you meant something else, sorry. Certainly there are all kinds of accents in country music, since the people are from all over the place.
The roots of country music are in the South and in rural areas. The “country music accent,” as it were, tends to reflect this.
ETA: It doesn’t really represent just one region, but it’s much further removed from, say, Mid-Atlantic, New England, or California coast accents than from Midwestern, Southern, or Western rural accents.
Hell.
I think I know what you mean; country singers do tend to sound like they all have the same (or very similar) accent, at least while they are singing. I do think that some of it is “put on” or at least exaggerated in some country singing simply because sometimes you can hear the same artists singing a country song with the heavy twang then singing a pop song without it.
It is what I refer to probably very un-politically-correctly as the “red-neck accent”. It can be heard across the country and seems to represent a mentality and lifestyle more than a region. The heaviest “red neck accent” speakers I know hail from vastly different areas.
Stratocaster and MitzeKatze make an interesting point. Does anyone know of country singers from the northeast (let’s say NY/NJ and northwards) or the west coast? Or hey, how about from Canada? It’d be interesting to compare them to singers from the south part of the US and see if they sound similar or not.
West Coast might be the “Bakersfield Sound.” Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, pretty much the Capitol Records Country line-up from the '60’s and '70’s.
Anne Murray was from Canada.
Just off the top of my head, Hank Snow and Shania Twain are both from Canada.
While in a general sense California, Oregon, and Washington could be considered West Coast, I don’t think of Bakersfield as being coastal California the way San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego are.
Isn’t Shania Twain from Canada or am I thinking of somebody else?
Since I do not listen to country music I am having a hard time coming up with any (popular or well known) country singers’ names at all.
ETA: My slow typing does it again! I need to learn to read the other posts while I am previewing my own so that I don’t repeat things.
Interesting thread!
People often seem to describe the vocals in country music as being “twangy”, but not all regularly Southern accents to my ears have that twang. The “twangiest”" Southern accented speakers I’ve encountered mostly seem to hail from Tennessee.
As far as country musicians go, Dolly Parton’s normal speaking voice is incredibly twangy, and she’s a Tennessee native.
My educated guess: it’s central Tennessee-flavored Southern.
That’s kind of what I’m getting at. The accent seems to be as much an aspect of the genre as the instrumentation, rhythm, etc. Does a singer from the north need to affect an accent while singing? Do they need to downplay their native accent to cultivate a more southern image the way a white rapper wants to appear “street”?
Something like this happened with grunge music in the early 90s. Grunge singers took on an accent that might be something like South Midland. Compare Grunge and Post-Grunge Stone Temple pilots for instance.
Doesn’t Bakersfield have a large Okie population, though, almost to the point where it’s Tulsa West?
Taylor Swift is from Penn. and Eddie Rabbitt was from NJ.
Keith Urban is from New Zealand. That’s pretty southern.
Country music has many accents: Appalachian, Countrypolitan [Nashville], Bluegrass… Oklahoma City has a big music scene. Texas has several. While Country is mainly associated with the west and southwest, it’s also the default music of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana.
I think there’s something to that. I suspect many (not all) country singers who don’t naturally have a “country” accent affect one, perhaps sometimes unintentionally.
I blame Bob Dylan.
True, many country singers hail from the south or midwest USA, but not all.
Factor in the centers for country music production (Nashville, Austin, Tulsa, Bakersfield), you’ll find that much ofthe population in general tends to have accents that “ain’t from around here” or mixed. This comes from the fact that these places are centers for other types of business as well.
IME, in the music business in Nashville, most of the folks that I’ve worked with aren’t native to Tennessee. We’ve come from somewhere else to take a gamble on our art form. I’ve written with people from the UK, CA, WI, MA, FL, TX and other areas (I’m a native Hoosier myself). I’ve performed with a crowd just as geographically varied. After a few years here, we tend to mix some of the native accent with our original one to make a sometimes hard-to- place blend.
So, no, there’s no one standard accent from a given place for all country music.
So it is. 
And, his accent while singing is mostly a twangy “southern American” accent.