 |
Down in Ellijay recently, signing and selling books to hordes of visitors at the Lions Club’s yearly Georgia Apple Festival.
Bagged apples, funnel cakes and barbecue … arts and crafts of every kind … a line of Porta-Jons almost as long as a football field.
Got into a friendly discussion with a country boy from south Georgia.
“Are you from around here?” he asked.
Yeah, from Murphy, N.C., about 40 miles north.
“I thought so,” he grinned at me. “I can hear that mountain twang in your voice.”
I beg your pardon (I thought but didn’t say) but isn’t somebody from south Georgia commenting on my accent about like the so-called kettle calling the pot black?
We then got into a very polite conversation about different accents, South and North.
The man from Plains
Probably the most famous man with a definite south Georgia speech is former President Jimmy Carter.
Some years ago, my wife and I were on our way to Florida and made it a point to visit the Baptist church in Plains, Ga., where Carter often taught Sunday school.
Spent the night in a motel in nearby Americus and got to the Plains church early. Stood in line to be checked out by the Secret Service (a big church bus from Cleveland, Tenn., arrived just about then).
Took our seats in the sanctuary and enjoyed the president’s lesson. He is a biblical scholar and gave us a good presentation; we had no trouble at all understanding him.
When he left the Presidency he had acquired a cabin at Ellijay and was a frequent diner at the Pink Pig barbecue place, where they had no difficulty taking his order.
Oh, waitress – no R please
On a hunting trip into south Georgia, we wound up in a decaying crossroads community, ate a strange dish and got a lesson in language.
The only restaurant among the old houses and boarded-up buildings was in a converted singlewide mobile home. It sat across the street from an ornate brick building once a bank, but now almost entirely covered in vines and trees.
Once inside the trailer/restaurant, we saw black and white diners, looked at their plates and ordered the local menu favorite, something called “hash.” Turned out to be stringy canned barbecue dumped onto a bed of white rice. But not bad.
A young local man came in and placed his order with the waitress. Both of them were young white folks, and he was obviously getting take-out meals for himself and his three employees somewhere on the job.
Naturally, he ordered hash plates.
“And I want fo’ ice teas,” he said.
“Fo’ teas,” she repeated, writing it down carefully.
Eastern N.C. & Tidewater
I worked on newspapers in the early 1960s in western North Carolina and heard their accents daily, very similar to south Georgia. Have relatives there, too, all talk like Carter with the soft accent and a slightly slower cadence than you hear in the Piedmont or the mountains.
Ignored their accent, but I was more interested in their speech patterns, their different phrasing of common words.
“I went down to his house, and he won’t there,” they would say. We would have said, “I went down to his house and he wasn’t there.”
Law officers on the witness stand would testify they saw the suspect “riding on a car.” I pointed out to the sheriff himself that you ride on a horse or even an open wagon, but you ride inside a car. He was not amused.
There is a unique Tidewater accent in extreme northeastern North Carolina and well up into the Virginia coastal counties. There were young men in our dormitories at Chapel Hill who spoke it, and we naturally found it hilarious to mimic their way of talking.
“Get out … get out … there’s a mouse in the house” is a simple sentence we could say in our regular drawls. But we liked to mock them by saying it their way –“Get oot … get oot … there’s a moose … in the hoose.”
North & South
I heard a Yankee accent for the first time when I was about 10 years old, thought it was about the funniest thing I’d encountered.
Folks next door had some relatives come down for a visit to small town North Carolina (that’s us), and they were apparently from Brooklyn or some section of New York City. We met the children daily for a week or so in the back yards.
There was a little Northern girl, about my age, and we rolled on the ground with laughter to hear her talk. We all naturally said “dawg,” which she pronounced “doig.”
But I’ve been laughed at up North and in Alaska for my own mild Southern accent. My managing editor on the Anchorage newspaper said my pronunciation of “nek-kid” instead of “na-ked” told people my origins.
Country superstar Loretta Lynn (from the Kentucky backwoods) expressed it best after Carter had moved into the White House, formerly occupied by Northerners and Westerners.
“It’s nice to finally have a president,” she said. “Who doesn’t have any accent at all …”
Carter and wife Rosalynn visited the King family’s flea market in Murphy’s Bealtown section shortly after leaving the White House. The late Charlie Johnson, who had just retired as town manager, introduced himself to Carter – “I’m a nobody now, just an old Democrat.”
He said Carter told him that he, too, was now “just an old Democrat.”
- President Jimmy Carter died on Dec. 29; Rosalynn died on Nov. 19, 2023.
Wally Avett of Martins Creek is former editor and Hillbilly Ranger columnist with the Cherokee Scout. Email him at wallyavett@gmail.com.