To be fair, these characters represent a measure of progress beyond the “Hollywood Southern” of the 20th century. It’s hard to imagine the production teams behind “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “The Dukes of Hazzard” setting aside funds for dialect coaches, or soliciting earnest statements from the cast about the months of research necessary to achieve pitch-perfect regional intonation. But the sincerity and the hard work can’t seem to shepherd these Southern characters into the modest domain of the plausible.
In the real world, we have no tolerance for failures in imitation. In 2021, there was Brian Kelly, then a 60-year-old son of Chelsea, Mass., and head coach of the Louisiana State football team, who tried on a Southern accent in a speech during a men’s basketball game and was instantly clowned for it. Kelly’s adoptive brothers in accent were hard to place — there were comparisons to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (who grew up in Alabama), Kenny Chesney (Tennessee) and Foghorn Leghorn (cartoon rooster based in part on a fictional politician based on a Texas rancher).
But perhaps Kelly was thinking of the patterns of speech on the big screen, where all the Southern accents collapse in on one another, creating something new and crude, if not a little alien. These mashes are stock Southern, a close cousin of the accent that runs through yeehaw country music. They are impossible to substitute for the living South, where there are endless differences in speech and tone found even within a single town, let alone from one state to another, let alone between generations or ethnic groups.
The English of the Blue Ridge Mountains elongates the I sound (“sun-liiight”), while the English of the Ozark Mountains more often changes the I to a short A (“sun-lat”). There are drawls, and then there are twangs, accented vowels that are compounded into two or three, sometimes changing the pace of speech, other times not. Rural and urban neighbors who have lived a short drive from one another for a lifetime might sound nothing alike. But in the movies, we split into two: Southern and not.
There are fine actors performing and perfecting this dialect of inorganic Southern speak, drifting further from the communities they have been paid, often handsomely, to emulate. The cartoonish Southerner can feel like the product of a closed conversation between outsiders, people whose claim to the region is summers spent under weeping willows in the well-to-do parts of Charleston, S.C. To consult, there might be a transplant in the room, someone who found a new life elsewhere but openly grieves his accent as a naughty little secret that comes out when he’s drunk or tired. Or worse, a person who hand-wrings, like me, about the discipline it took to lose her accent after formative years, a useless project that crumbles the moment she crosses the Mason-Dixon.