Southern accents
I’d been at my uncle’s house for a few days. Daddy and I had been staying there after Mama’s funeral that was just far enough away from my house to make it not worth going home each night. All told I was away from home for about four days.
When I got back in town my wife and I went to dinner and as we pulled back into our driveway she said, “You always have a more distinct drawl when you’ve been around you dad and uncles, you know that?” “They have accents?”, I asked naively.
“Ummm yes,” she said as if I’d just asked her if grass grew out of the ground.
I remembered that conversation recently while watching a video of my Uncle Tom telling old stories; I listened to the way he wrapped his voice around the words and let each syllable slip out a little at a time. I took in each chuckle between words as he regaled with the way life used to be.
Tom Petty once sang about this kind of accent; about how the young folks call it country and the Yankees call it dumb. I don’t know that I can be considered young anymore, and I certainly am not a yankee, so I don’t call it either of those things. I guess to me it’s just music. It’s as natural as the birds singing in the early morning and the leaves rustling in a cool fall breeze.
It’s the sound of my childhood and the way I prefer to hear a story.
With the proliferation of media, those accents are fading away more and more everyday and it scares me a little bit. I doubt it’ll be in my lifetime, but I guess eventually that southern accent will be a dead language; archaeologists may one day stumble across some letter written in my people’s dialect and not be able to decipher it.
Until then, I’ll keep watching those videos. I’ll keep sitting at kitchen tables hearing the same stories over and over, cherishing every single syllable like it’s the last bite of my Aunt Connie’s pie or the first swig of ice cold water on a hot summer day.
