You've heard her, but I'm not going to post an example here.

It makes you cringe.

They should ask her for advice on a convincing accent, but it makes you cringe? So, if her accent is convincing, then everyone from the south must make you cringe. Either you dislike people from the south, or you have no idea what a southern accent sounds like.

Heck, even within Benton County there are different accents.

I was born in Hot Springs, and we have accents, but most of my relatives on my mother's side live up around Glenwood and Amity. Now there's some southern accents.
When I graduated high school I moved to California. It took about a year, but I started sounding like I was born there. When I finally got out of the service, I headed straight back to Arkansas. It took about a week before I was sounding like I never left. I wasn't faking it either.

between the accents of "town kids" and "country kids". "Country kids", who were mostly from hilly parts of the county, also used "done" to mean "already" and tended to have trouble distinguishing between simple past and past participle verbs, as well as between singular and plural verbs.

I don't need advice from anybody on what a southern accent sounds like. When we first moved to CA I was ten years old and I sounded like Gomer Pyle. I was ridiculed and called a hillbilly and a shitkicker at school. I actually got in fights because of the way I talked. Eventually the accent disappeared and by the time I joined the army you could not tell where I was from by listening to me.

I neither like nor dislike people from the south, I don't judge people based on where they are from. I don't like Hillary Clinton however, but her godawful fake accent is not even 1 percent of why.

I don't like Bernie Sanders, but his not being able to talk without yelling is not why. Even on that.

When I moved from Arkansas to California out of high school, my sisters boyfriend literally rolled on the ground laughing when I first spoke to him. After about a year I was talking just like him with the California accent, and when I got out of the army I made a beeline back to Arkansas. It took about a week or less before you couldn't even tell I'd ever left. I've known people from the north, east, and west, who have adopted southern speech patterns after moving here without even realizing it until I pointed it out. I guess it kind of grows on you. It may not always be grammatically correct, but in my opinion, it's easy on the ears.

No wonder everything is so divisive these days.

Indeed. So much cringe.

no matter what the topic.

And better yet, lead other people to do so.

Fortunately Bernie is better than many of his schoolyard supporters.

Do you have some kind of bot that can search out posts that are less than adoring of your idol?

It's pretty much an accepted fact that Clinton's bogus accent is laughably bad, but the fact that I mentioned it in a post doesn't mean that I "hate" her. I believe she lacks the maturity, judgment and moral compass to hold high elected office, but hell, you could say the same thing about a majority of elected officials in the US. You could certainly say it about the four presidents that immediately preceded Obama.

little comment, right near the top of the thread.

because I lived there long enough to find the Hollywood variety grating. Then again, southern actors have traditionally spent huge amounts of money getting rid of those accents, so I guess we're stuck with more "fiddle dee dee."

is that they are just 20th or 21st century people dressed up in old clothes. Completely modern attitudes and behaviors, and it's gotten so I rarely am willing to read a historical novel any more.

Movies or TV shows are even worse, alas.

While I, a northern gal, wouldn't really be able to identify the nuances of different Southern accents, if they were done right I bet I'd come away feeling that I'd been immersed in that time and culture. The essential problem, in my opinion, is that Hollywood just doesn't think anyone out here can tell the difference. I notice all sorts of factual errors in many TV shows and movies, and the really scary part is a lot of people think if they see it on a screen, it must be true.

If you can't do the willing dis-belief thing, or if the transcendent issues that link the fiction to the reader's life and times is too obvious, then immersion into the fiction doesn't really work.

While noticing the range of accents within the members of the hotel owning family, I tripped hard over the introduction of the topic of psychological impacts of battle. Introduced in the storyline as 'soldiers' heart' it's obviously meant to link the experience of war to our own time and the preeminence of PTSD in contemporary American thinking about war. We were also introduced to authoritarian gender biased hierarchies in medicine. And we've been introduced to bias, and profiteering in the supply chain...things which seem like they might be important to the anticipated storyline, but we've also been introduced to a dozen or so points of women's clothing and fashion. Whether these things actually carry much value to the storyline. or are just there to demonstrate the production links to knowledge pulled out of Godey's magazine remains to be seen.

Of course, people's awareness and interest in all the supporting produciton components varies greatly. The more you know the more you can pick fault. The more engaged you are in the storyline the more willingly a viewer may be to dismiss/overlook them...

It's really a rare piece of interpretation that well engages the experience and intellectual interests of everyone across an audience as broad as American viewership.

Are you an historian or literary critic? Great points.

Per your insights above, I do think that Mercy Street's attempt to link the "transcendent issues" to "the reader's life and times" was indeed too obvious to allow me, at least, to be immersed.

Obviously every interpretation of another historical era is inherently, well, interpretive (ideological), so I guess for me it comes down to how the producers/directors balance that authorial intent with some attempt to recreate the psychological and physical reality of the era invoked.

I think both Rome and John Adams made great inroads into this and were willing--in fact, challenged--their viewers to be a little uncomfortable in service of some consistent attempt at accuracy (recognizing what we define as "accurate" is always historically constructed as well).
They weren't perfect but there was at least a humility about trying to understand the past. Any discomfort, like a cart full of body parts, induced in Mercy Street was obviously intended to confirm our current assumptions--war amputations were hell--without getting us inside the heads of people with very different understandings.

I think this willingness to let your audience be truly uncomfortable, or at least patient, in service to some sort of authenticity is well-illustrated when comparing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice to the awful movie version a decade or so later. The former version forced the viewer to tolerate a pace of change, and understanding, and misunderstanding, that challenges our contemporary expectations about more direct interpersonal, therapeutically informed communication. The latter was a slapdash ticking off of scenes designed for 21st century audiences to enjoy some self-congratulatory, immediate sense of comeuppance against sexism and classism.

I can't think of another film or series about American history that comes close to John Adams in evoking what life then might have been like. Part of that was the point of the biography itself, which was intended to challenge our "great men are perfect" assumptions, but the nuance we were intended to develop in understanding him translated into asking the viewers to think in a more nuanced way about the Revolutionary Era in general.

There was also a scene where the folks in Manhattan were eating pheasant, a species not introduced to N. Am. at that time.

I liked the series Rome, I did a couple of years of Latin in HS so I had a flimsy notion of Roman culture and a dilitante's interest. The series seemed to pick up on a lot of stuff that might be called the margins public awareness. I have to admit that for me the story-line seemed to become more forced at the series moved toward its conclusion. Still I enjoyed the costuming and sets.

I think it was terribly over budget.

So, they rewrote what would have been a marvelous 3-4 seasons into one.

I've got the DVD series on Rome and they have voiceover and historical analysis versions of every episode where the actors, directors, and historical advisers discuss their choices.

Just the production values/commitment to physical accuracy is amazing. They put together and folded up the tent in the first episode 40 times!!! to give it a weathered look. The actor soldiers actually trained in cold weather up in the mountains. No wonder it went over budget, but it was amazing, wasn't it?

That's hilarious about Turn. I lasted about 5 minutes with that show after enduring the overacting of the guy playing George Washington. Maybe AMC can't get anything earlier than 1960 right!

Heck, I read science fiction. I WRITE science fiction, so I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them.

Since I haven't been watching the series being discussed, I cannot comment directly on it, but from what people are saying, it's just another case of fully modern people being dressed in old clothes, but they think, talk, and behave exactly like 2016 Americans.

If you've a mind to do so, read "Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove. It's an alternate history. Apartheid racists from 2014 South Africa show up, arm General Robert E Lee's army with AK47's, and therefore the South wins the Civil War. I recommend it because the 19th century people in the novel feel like genuine 19th century people, full of their era's prejudices, misconceptions, and behaviors. The 21st century people really are 21st century people, and stand in stark contrast (although they aren't on stage very much) to the others.

Turtledove has been a historian, knows how to do his research, and has respect for the different ways people think and behave in different eras.

As an aside, sometimes reading a novel from any time prior to WWII, which is set in the now of when it is written, is highly illuminating, precisely because it does accurately show how people thought and behaved then. That's why Mark Twain and Jane Austen, just to name two, are still read today. We can get a huge amount of insight into their times by reading what they wrote.

is challenging. The pull of making their interests, emotions,and thereby motivations and drives seem familiar is strong. But I can see how the result could be either mostly missing history or making the characters seem so familiar that the distinguishing a character's life in the period from our own could be lost.

Authors set their work into the stream of history, and readers encounter it in different places in time. Sometimes the original message is seen as the author meant it, and sometimes current events cause different things to be noticed. I think Twain's "Letters From The Earth" shows Twain as a quite modern politically cynical person, the sort of person who we'd love to watch on the Daily Show. On the otherhand many modern people trip over his use language that was common in his time, take offense at his work and consider him unworthy of admiration.

go too far in trying to make characters familiar. Again, modern people simply dressed in old clothes doesn't work for me. I want people from that actual era, with those specific problems and issues, and I can make the connection between us myself.

True, people often have a problem with some of Twain's language, especially in "Huckleberry Finn", but when that happens, those people need to learn a little bit more about the era in which it was set. Good literature ought to make us think, ought to challenge our beliefs, ought to shake up our little world.

Not that I believe any of us should only read serious literature. Goodness knows, I don't, and I find those who only read it to be somewhat boring.

I find the British actors tend to do the Southern Accents better. {Part of me thinks it is just all that BBC training, but also the fact that the Southern Accent is derived from Scottish influenced Elizabethian English. Ye all was a proper grammar in Scotland during Elizabeth's time, and it got morphed into Y'all

in the Coastal South than almost any actress portraying a southerner today.

more closely follow British speech patterns.

when playing other Brits and thus to be a Brit actor many are already doing an 'accent' that is learned and not native.
At this link, you can hear Patrick 'Voice of God' Stewart using his natural accent.
http://www.wimp.com/yorkshiredialect/

I have never heard a Pittsburgh accent on screen, even in films that purportedly take place entirely in Pittsburgh.


Unless it's so conspicuously discordant that it derails the story (like, for instance, a thick Chinese accent coming from a 10th-generation white guy living in the Ozarks) then I simply file it under "suspension of disbelief." After all, dialogue isn't a faithful portrayal of real speech, so I don't need an accent to be perfectly accurate either. "Close enough" is close enough.

Unfortunately, I can't suspend disbelief, but I suspect BBC works screw up accents all the times and since I don't know the difference between Midlands, London, Wales, or whatever, I don't notice.

As your basic mutt northerer, I have no talent for discerning the intricacies of Southern accents. I work in a call center and speak with people from FL, GA, SC, NC, VA, KS and TN all the time, but they all hit my clumsy ear as "southern accent."

But I can tell Philly from a Chicago from a Wisconsin from a Maine from a New Jersey, etc., but anything south of the Mason-Dixon is lost on me.

There's a big difference in regions even within states.
People who live in SC have to decipher Charleston accents like everybody else.

Now I'm going to waste time reading about the linguistic evolution of the Charleston accent! Darn you!

I do wonder if there was a French influence with the speaking out of the back of your throat that, combined with the Tidewater-ish Colonial English accent and the influence of captive Africans arriving in the port led to its particular don't move the lower half of your face sound (which is different from the French influence in "Nahlins.&quot

a good Pittsburgh accent in "The Deer Hunter." I saw that movie when it first came out with a friend from Pit, and he said she had it right.

I haven't seen The Deer Hunter in ages, but she's so good with accents that I'm inclined to believe you.

if an accent were a vital part in the casting decision, half of the roles in Hollywood would never get filled.

granted this is regarding regional accents concerning a very specific part of our history in a very specific part of our nation, that said, the above statement still applies.

just the facts.

I'm a very old and jaded filmmaker.

I get your point and appreciate your insight as somebody in the industry.

I think it's that, if you have a major budget to do a fictional film about the Civil War era, to conflate the Confederacy into one accent/lifestyle that is part of a 20th century mainstream mythologizing of the South is just really, really lazy when you could find 10,000 master's level students and 1000 PhDs who would probably work for $25/hr or plain volunteer to clean it up for you.

The actors are better off simply not bothering with affecting accents. Clark Gable did that and it worked out fine, in part because he was an "outsider" character. Or Barney Fife in Andy Griffith show. Holly Hunter is an actual Southerner and her pace of speech is accurate. Many of us talk fast. We just drag out our vowels to different degrees. Better they not do it if they're going to butcher our speech.

Plus, Alexandria was near urban compared with Deep South plantation life--they had a lot more in common with their Maryland neighbors than many in Mississippi. To manufacture major differences between people who lived 20 miles from Union headquarters is superimposing a 20th century understanding onto the lives of people in the 1860s. I mean, 21st century historians understand that the "South" was mythologized in the 20th century. That a major production didn't even bother to understand its 21st century biases (like being so obvious about ptsd, gender and race) and on top of that imposed the bias of an additional era is the height of historiographical incompetence.

I just get sick of how scholarly work is so marginalized. Some of that is because the academy became so careerized that faculty allowed themselves to be marginalized through some insular idea that reaching out to broader audiences was equivalent to selling out. Ironically, it's this insularity that has allowed so many humanities scholars to be railroaded by academic capitalism.

Hollywood is Hollywood. I guess I can't blame them. Maybe it was on some history faculty to get off their asses and make a few phone calls to famous alumni to get jobs as advisers or something.

if, as in this case, it's a historical drama, there is usually, but not always a voice/accent coach that works with the actors either before or during production.

but, sadly, that is not always the case.

Once it appears as if the actor has "mastered" the accent, the voice coach is usually cut from the budget. In reality, the director is under pressure from the studio to get the ball rolling and it's usually the studio that deems the accent as "good enough".

stereotypes still very much exist in Hollywood's movie grind machine.

depending on the director, producer and the studio, they think one regional dialect is like all others.

As a person who grew up in the South with very little accent (parents were from the North/Canada), I can hear the different accents in the different Southern states, but not imitate them well. IMO, employing actors with no accents is vastly preferable to the habit of having, say, a woman from 1860 acting like she was in 2016. I have not seen "Mercy," but if they are referring to stuff like ptsd, acting as if women had full agency in 1860, and that there were tons of free black people who could do what they want, then I don't want to watch the show. Not only is it historically inaccurate, casual viewers in the South will come away with the idea that "it wasn't so bad!" back then for women/blacks/Chinese/children, which is far from the truth. There's enough overt propaganda out there -- let's not add to it.

There were a few free blacks (even in the South) who could do what they wanted - within limits, which they were very aware of. The occasional Black surgeon, or engineer, landholder, educator, or businessman dealing as a peer with white compatriots had been recorded, but considered scandalous and unusual - and most society, black and white, would treat him with suspicion and the occasional scorn. There would have to be an exceptional reason to include him, or perhaps he would "pass" and it would not be known that he was black until someone found out, and then it would be a scandal.

There were a few women who had full agency, but they were considered independent heiresses who either lived off their trusts or ran their father's (or husband's)business upon his incapacity or death, or otherwise hard women/uppity shrews that "no sane man either dared cross or would want to marry" - as they had no male to take care of them, they would be allowed license take care of themselves and their own business until a man could take over. Unless, of course, they were prostitutes.
I suspect there were more women who lived their lives as men than there were women who had full agency. Again, it's "passing". Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction America was by default a White Man's world wherever you were, and wealth was the primary differentiation between them.

Children - well, children were to be seen and not heard. There was no such thing as teenage; if you were old enough to take care of yourself, to have a skill that made money, or were old enough to have children yourself, you were considered an adult, and were responsible to act like one. The modern teenage casualness, tempers, indulgences were not acceptable to the poor and middle class, because one could not afford to be a teenager - that was only something wealthy teens could afford, and even then, only the boys for the most part.

As you indicated, if there were a lot of free black people or women (or angst-ridden teenagers) who would be able to act outside of their own social bounds, it would be unwatchable for anyone who knew history. I don't think I'd have any interest in watching a PBS version of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman", even if they threw a little "Copper" or "Deadwood" in to take the saccharine out.

Haele

Now you know how we Mainers feel!

I can tell within seconds if a fellow Carolinian is from the east of the state or the west.

That's my favorite accent to imitate. (coastal NC native here)

It's weird how you can drive 20 minutes outside of the Triangle and encounter such a shift. I've had days when I'm in meetings with scientists from all the over the world and then over in Clayton (Clu-Ayeh-Tun) for an errand (taking kids to a farm corn maze). It's really cool.

We always thought it was so funny that Scotty McCreery acts like he's s from this totally rural, isolated, "water tower town" (Garner), but Garner is within 10 to 30 minutes' distance of Research Triangle Park and three major research universities. More like a tech-start-up tower town.

Don't know where you are currently, but I think the Triangle is developing a "multiversity" accent with all of the transplants, and foreign nationals. My kids sound more like they're from Maryland.

Kids nowadays sound like they're all from California.

I was born in Goldsboro, but a Charlottean from one year on.

Sometimes, even PBS can miss the mark.

Maybe they should leave it to HBO and BBC. Rome and John Adams were head and shoulders above this.

Off-topic: the show is filmed (okay, maybe it's saved to a hard drive, but you know what I mean) in Richmond, Virginia.

I assume it's because they couldn't find a parking spot in Alexandria.

This is the only one I know of ...

I was born in New Jersey near NYC ... When we arrived in Southern California, everybody there had a field day with my Jersey brogue .... However, everybody there sounded like they were from Texas, in my little mind ...

My dad was from Tennessee ... My dad was a completely violent right wing alcoholic asshole ...

I despised his ugly violence
I despised the sound of his voice ... The sound of a southern drawl sickens me inside ...
I despised his musical choices ... To this day, Country Western music is jealously avoided ...

ANYTHING that reminds me of him is shunted to bypass my human soul ...

That is just how it is ... I've dealt with the emotional residues of his negative behaviors for decades, and have lived a decent non reactive existence in spite if all that ...

I still hold him in contempt for that southern mindset that he held ... The WORST of his ugly racist behaviors ... .. (I learned the 'N' word from him early on - I also learned that my Brooklyn born mother was willing to take me aside secretly and assure me that usage of THAT word is NOT acceptable, and that hatred based on skin color was wrong ... She was my true teacher in life - my father, in the other hand, was a nearly worthless human being)

Anyways ... Mercy Street ... Incredibly moving song by Peter Gabriel ... There is redemption in that musical art ...

This tells me you won. You got out. You didn't continue it. You didn't become it.

You won.

Long may you reign!

And PS, I love that song too.

The 'correct' local accent today is not the same as it was back then. So suspend your disbelief willingly perhaps? The fact is that you have no clue what 1860's Virginians sounded like, none of us do. You are also using your 2015 ideas of the accents and places and superimposing those onto the period.
Consultants to take your complaints to include James M. McPherson who is no slouch and Dr Stanley Burns of Burns Archives fame.

Linguists have inferred pronunciations well into the Anglo-Saxon period. They've certainly made confident inferences about dialect changes in America over the past few hundred years, aided now by recording (and there were people living in that era well into the 20th century, like my great-grandmother).

I'm saying that it is assumption and theory, there is no record.
I'm saying that if you want to hold up 'confident inferences' as if they were some form of well known common knowledge and stake out your views on those inferences, that's your choice. But I am not required to accept inferences as facts.

I'm also going to say that most people are very bad judges of their own and their local accents. They are not the right people to say 'that's correct' because they do not really hear them unless trained to hear them. The great majority of CA, for example will tell you 'we have no accent' but they sure as shit do. And most regions have a similar lack of ear for their own way of speaking.

and as others said, sometimes there's more focus on the actor bringing the role to life than getting an accent 100% accurate....

FWIW, "Concussion" was a great movie, but Will Smith's Nigerian accent was laughably bad...

since his family owned a tobacco plantation in MD. Throw a little Brandywine in there...

which has been described as "southern Brooklynese". The all-time guffaw winner was Dennis Quaid in "The Big Easy"; not entirely his fault, though, as the producers couldn't quite decide if his character was Cajun or Creole!

They only one I've heard pull it off was Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Not a huge surprise, as he spent a lot of time down there after Katrina and until recently owned a house in the Quarter.

Quaid is Texan and Pitt born in OK and raised there and in MO.

Some character cliches in movies have literally annoyed me enough to turn them off, because I know that the rest of the movie isn't going to be much better.

It's true in other areas as well not just the south. I can forgive it if the writing is good. I haven't seen this production yet.

Thanks for your opinion

From one of Rita Mae Brown's novels.

Although there are no sources of absolute proof, I have heard from historians that accents before and during the Civil War were much the same. North and south, they carried much of the immigrant residual tones of the new country. It was the years following the Civil War that developed the drawl of the southern accent that is still prevalent today.

Is that accurate? I don't know it for a fact. It surprised me when I first heard this. Has anyone else heard this or have any idea about the authenticity of it?