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The Knoxville accent, whether it exists or not

by Jack Neely

Through no intention of my own, I’m often expected to fill the role of representative Knoxvillian. I find myself in a room full of immigrants, from Michigan or Massachusetts or California or Sevierville. Invariably, one of them asks one particular question, and it’s one of the most perplexing questions I ever get: Why don’t you have a Knoxville accent?

I can’t help but think they seem disappointed in me, as if they’d come expecting a performance. Maybe, upon meeting Italian-Americans, they ask, “but where’s your monkey?”

You’d think I’d have figured out how to answer that question by now. The fact is I just don’t know. I’m not even sure I understand the question. After 45 years here, I’m not a bit sure I know what a Knoxville accent is.

I assume that most of us develop our accents in early childhood. If I’d imprinted my accent based on somebody I knew as a kid in the ‘60s, I’d have a pretty liberal choice. Many of the people I grew up with in the ‘60s were from here, or within 200 miles of here, but some of them spoke differently from each other. Some spoke very fast, some very slow. Some spoke crisply, some with a slur. Some had deep voices, some had a nasal whine.

Some pronounced the same word in ways different from most others. Some said “inter-esting,” some said “intresting.” Some of the older people, I thought, sounded like characters in movies: one old man sounded like comic Ed Wynn, another like Foghorn Leghorn, another like the Tin Man, another like Andy Griffith, another like Mr. Magoo, another like Billy Graham. I knew what a Yankee accent was, roughly, and most of them didn’t have that. Then again, some of them did.

Some people had Southern accents, some people were “country,” and a lot of people didn’t have any sort of an accent that was particularly memorable in any way. I noticed early on that many of the people whose voices I heard most, teachers and librarians, didn’t seem to have accents at all. Or if they did, it was the lightest sort of a thing, like a doily atop a hairdo.

Only a few American cities have distinctive municipal accents: Chicago, New York, Boston. Most other accents are more representative of a broad region that may encompass thousands of square miles. So, I suspect people use the phrase “Knoxville accent” loosely, without thinking so much about city limits. What they really mean is the garden-variety Southern accent or, more likely, its black-sheep cousin, the rural Southern Appalachian accent. There’s some variety within that family of dialects, from the Gomerian to the Gooberian, but it all tends to be nasal, with extraneous syllables, flat vowels, and a bonus W thrown in here and there.

The most conspicuous marker is the flat i—or as linguists call it, the monophthongal i. It tends to be most striking when it comes before a hard consonant, as in the words night or fight. That’s where Southern Appalachians part ways with mainstream Southerners—who are careful to give those i’s just enough of a lilt to be certain you don’t mistake them for Southern Appalachians.

During the World’s Fair, a colleague from West Virginia told me the monophthongal i was an object of some ridicule at his home, where they called it “the Tennessee flat.” He claimed he didn’t know people actually talked that way until he came here. In making fun of it, some find it helpful to approximate it phonetically by spelling it with a short a, as in, “rat now.”

Growing up in and around the Bearden area, I occasionally encountered kids my age who had the flat, and I tended to give them a wide berth. Not out of snobbishness, I hope, but it was my prejudice, based on a few experiences, that boys who brandished the flat i wanted to fight. Or, as they said, fat.

Many Knoxvillians today do have an Appalachian accent, or something akin to it. But the people here who have it are not all people who are from Knoxville. Sometimes they, or their parents, are from the countryside near here. Sometimes they’re from much farther away.

I recently heard a relative newcomer remark at the “Knoxville accent” of a local radio personality. “See, she has a Knoxville accent,” the immigrant explained, “but you don’t.” I happened to know the radio professional in question moved here not too long ago from Little Rock, Ark. Which is farther from Knoxville than, say, Chicago is.

The “Knoxville accent” reaches even farther than Arkansas. There was a news story last year about some recent studies of what was described as a regional-specific accent. Scholars explained that this particular accent is characterized by the use of certain key words: y’all, fixin’ to, might-could, dawg, yonder, waddn (for wasn’t). Everything they said about this accent sounded familiar. But they didn’t call it Southern Appalachian. They called it Texan.

Guy Bailey, a UT scholar—that’s University of Texas—suggested that the flat i was nothing less than “the badge of Texas.” He says you can determine how much a newcomer likes Texas by how fast they adopt the flat i to fit in.

Texans are proud of nearly everything, of course, and like to believe they’re unique and distinctive. They don’t always admit that the Texas accent, as they describe it themselves, is equally at home, and probably older, in East Tennessee. A few articles do observe that the West Texas accent is afflicted with the Southern Appalachian “twang” and may be indistinguishable from, say, Western North Carolinian.

Most folks who grew up here can tell a Middle Tennessean from an East Tennessean based on how they talk. It’s easier if they’re older, but that distinction’s usually so clear you can bet money on it.

Here’s the funny thing: I’m not nearly as confident that I could tell the difference between someone from Seymour and someone from Lubbock. Even though Lubbock’s farther from here than is, say, Havana.

So the “Tennessee Flat” is the “Badge of Texas.” Of course.

Is there anything distinctive about our region? Y’all is nearly universal across the South, and is also common in black communities in the North and West. It’s said to be catching on everywhere, even in Britain. The language clearly needs a plural for you, and y’all is answering the demand. Here in Knoxville, we answer that need with two: y’all and you’uns. The latter is known to surprise some newcomers, but it’s not unique to East Tennessee. You hear it as far north as Pittsburgh and eastern Ohio. Pittsburghers say yunz or yinz, and are, in fact, known as Yinzers.

Knoxville may not have many distinctions, but it may well be where the Y’all South and the Y’unz Middle Appalachia intersect.

Some accents seem age-related. There’s a stratum of Knoxvillians who are now between the ages of 50 and 90 who do have a kind of a loose-limbed variant of an accent that bears at least the suspicion of a genetic relationship with Appalachian. They chew on their words, roll them around in their mouths before wholly spitting them out, employing the optional and purely gratuitous post-vowel W wherever it will fit, in words like cawl and dawg and footbawl.

My parents have a sort of a drawl. But they sound much more like people of their generation, especially their old friends from West High, than they sound like any of their own parents.

But not all older Knoxvillians have it. And I don’t hear it nearly as much among younger people, which makes me wonder if the middle-class, mid-century Knoxville drawl was an accent that lasted only one or two generations.

I’ve also known a whole stratum of Knoxvillians, most of them born before 1920, who have what you might think of as an old-fashioned deep-Southern accent. It’s almost as if the vagueness of their drawls, ellisions, and tapering off sentences, implies some aristocratic casualness or, perhaps, a greater interest in beauty than in precision.

I’ve also heard proletarian claims that those deep-South accents are, when practiced in Knoxville, fake.

But the fact is that a whole, whole lot of us Knoxvillians don’t have much of an accent at all. I’ve brought up this issue with several accentless colleagues and friends of mine who grew up here. We’ve all been accused, at one time or another, of being Yankees.

Are we faking it? Are we trying to hide from our roots?

I’d rather not think so. But then again, you can never be sure. It’s tempting to blame it on the homogeneity of radio or TV, and that may have had something to do with it. But I’ve actually known quite a few older Knoxvillians who grew up before the era of radio who still didn’t have much of an accent. And electronic communications doesn’t quite explain why some accents seem to get stronger, not weaker, with successive generations. I’ve heard people remark that Congressman Jimmy Duncan has a thicker country accent than his father, Knoxville mayor and Congressman John Duncan did. I don’t know if he does or not; that’s just what I hear.

And here’s another puzzle: Long before the first radio, one of America’s first dialect humorists was George Washington Harris, a Knoxvillian. Though born in Pennsylvania, the orphaned Harris was raised from pre-school years by his older brother in Knoxville. He had little formal education, working from an early age as a Knoxville jeweler and machinist and sometime riverboat pilot. He lived most of his life in Knoxville, but developed a national reputation as a humorist who trafficked in making fun of Southern country accents as he heard them in the 1850s and ‘60s. His phonetic spellings are broad and sometimes recognizable as basic Southern Appalachian as we know it today.

Harris died in 1869, before the era of recorded sound, so we don’t know what he sounded like, himself. But occasionally in his Sut Lovingood stories, he inserts himself as a character: a straight man named “George” who describes himself as a lifelong Knoxvillian. To judge by the lack of phonetic spellings and eccentric phraseology that color all his other characters, George, the Knoxvillian, has no accent at all. He might as well be Bud Abbott.

Scholars have noted a similar phenomenon in Cormac McCarthy’s gamey novel Suttree. The title character is a lifelong Knoxvillian on the lam from his middle-class roots. Scholars have noted that though many of the other characters in the book have colorful regional accents, Suttree’s own accent isn’t discernible. Maybe it’s interesting that McCarthy moved, in middle age, to West Texas.

My own family, before my parents, was like the Confederate Congress, a convention of Southern accents. Two of my grandparents, my dad’s folks, were from middle Tennessee, and had their own versions of the deep-South accent, which, from some mouths, can sound vaguely Brooklynesque. My grandfather, who was born in the 1890s and raised on a farm in Williamson County, would say “toin” for “turn,” and dropped all terminal R’s. He spoke little, though, and in a sort of growl. He could have been an understudy for the role of Don Corleone.

His brother, in spite of the fact that he spent most of his life in California—or maybe because of it—was much more flamboyantly Southern, like William Faulkner after a couple of pints of Old Granddad. Which is to say, like William Faulkner.

My grandmother, who knew William Faulkner, grew up on the town square of the county seat of Dickson County and went to college in Mississippi, sounded markedly different. Her accent did sound plausibly Southern, but it also had a wash of Eastern in it. To me, her accent sounded a good deal like the accent of Franklin Roosevelt.

She also had some poetry in her diction, resulting in words like “’twould” and “’twill.” I never hear those words anymore from anybody, anywhere. It’s possible that hers was just an accent that may have been stylish among educated folks throughout prewar America, the one you hear now only in dressy movies of the ‘30s and recordings of fireside chats.

Hers and my grandfather’s accents were different from each other, but nobody on that side of the family had much use for r’s. Except when they began a word-, in which case they were offered a discreet nod, r’s were beneath contempt. They were shunned, renounced, banned from polite society, dismissed without notice.

The other side of my family considered itself just as Southern, but was more different from my grandfather and grandmother than they were from each other. My mother’s family was from Jellico and Eastern Kentucky. That side of the family did have a working respect for r’s, sometimes even seemed to exaggerated them, perhaps to prove they were Republicans. All of them except for my Aunt Mary Love, an inlaw who was from small-town Mississippi and has sultry Cajun colorings in her voice.

My grandfather on that side, a lifelong East Tennessean, died when I was 10, and I don’t remember his accent very well. He may have had one, except that in my memory he didn’t have a bit of a drawl; he liked to pronounce things crisply, in rhythms almost staccato.

His wife, my grandmother, who spent her whole adult life in Knoxville, had a little bit of a drawl, maybe, but if you overlook her attraction to some interjections like “My stars” and “I swan,” she could have been from anywhere.

But here’s something that’s harder to explain, and threatens to throw out the whole family and region-of-youth paradigm. My grandmother may not have had much of an accent, but her younger sister had a full-tilt, head-for-the-hills Appalachian accent, with the distinctive flat i’s, even in words with hard terminal consonants like bright and light. I first noticed it when I was about four.

The funny thing about my great aunt is that she traveled more than most folks in my mostly homebound family, living for a few years of her young adulthood in Panama, ultimately settling in Colorado. Through all her travels, she kept a death-grip on her Appalachian flats like a shotgun.

Sometimes I’ve offered a simplistic theory about it; that the Deep South accent that my father’s family had, sort of, is the exact opposite of the Appalachian accent that some in my mother’s family had, to varying degrees, and that the Babel of Southern accents I grew up with canceled each other out. But I think it’s more complicated than that.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe I do have an accent, and all these folks who insist that I don’t are either being overly polite or simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

Someone once told me that I have a Southern accent after I’ve had a few beers. But since both conditions are associated with a slur, how do you really tell the difference? And is there really a quantifiable difference between being Southern and being drunk?

You can look at some recent truck commercials on TV and think maybe not.

Growing up I knew a kid from Holston Hills who had an Appalachian accent, with the flat i’s. But his sister didn’t have it, his brother didn’t have it, even his parents didn’t have it. I don’t know why he brandished it as he did, except perhaps as an act of rebellion.

In fifth grade, we used to make vicious fun of the nasal Midwestern precision of the accent of an unfortunate schoolmate just in from Ohio. I ran into her at a party 30 years later, surprised to learn she sounds fully Tennessean. So much so that, if I had her accent today, I would be satisfyingly Knoxvillian to newcomers from Ohio.

A friend and sometime colleague with whom I collaborated on a book, moved to Dublin in 1999. I was just a little alarmed when I encountered him a couple of years later and found that he had developed a full, and completely unselfconscious, Irish brogue.

Here’s what I suspect: accents sometimes say more about personality than about region of origin. Some folks are just more susceptible to accents. Some personalities seem to take the dye of an accent better than others. Maybe it’s a matter of permeability, a personal porousness, which I suppose can be a useful thing.

Is there a Knoxville accent? I’ve come to have doubts about whether any such thing exists. Why should it, after all?

People sometimes describe the city’s obvious plurality of out-of-region newcomers as if it were a new thing: they mention TVA, ORNL. But before that, it was industry and the wholesale business that drew people from other regions. Before that, it was Knoxville’s status as a territorial and state capital. From its earliest days, Knoxville has always been half-full of newcomers from outside of the region. There’s never been a time when Knoxville was dominated by Knoxvillians.

Clarence Brown, North Knoxvillian and famously generous UT alum, was born in Massachusetts. Bob Neyland was from Texas. Harcourt Morgan, for whom Morgan Hall is named, and the “local” on the original TVA board who favored overalls, was from Canada. James Agee, who has no Southern accent in recordings but was said to be able to put on a Southern accent as needed, was born in Knoxville, but his mother’s family was from Michigan. Lowell Blanchard, popular politician and radio announcer, the genius behind the Mid-Day Merry Go Round, was from Illinois. Horace Maynard, for whom Maynardville and the Horace Maynard School are named, was from Amherst, Mass. As were his friends, tycoon Perez Dickinson, for whom Dickinson Island is named, and teacher Joseph Estabrook, for whom Estabrook Hall is named. Peter Kern, popular Knoxville mayor who started Kern’s Bread, was from Heidelberg, Germany. If you mixed all those formative Knoxvillians together, would we finally hear a Knoxville accent?

A century ago, people who had grown up speaking German were prominent in Knoxville politics; people whose parents had grown up speaking French were prominent in business. There were Swiss barbers, Italian confectioners, Jewish grocers. More numerous than those groups were Northerners here for the opportunities, Ohio businessmen, mixed with a few Deep Southerners here for many of the same reasons. Meanwhile, Greeks were arriving daily, bringing their own accents, selling us sandwiches and shoes. On the streets, black people playing guitars, singing the blues, running saloons, preaching.

And there were country people. Cas Walker was from Sevier County, but folks from Sevier County may sound different from people from Putnam County. Country people from Monroe County may sound different from country people from Claiborne County. And successful country people may sound different from unsuccessful country people. They all settled here in Knoxville, along with the others, bringing their own ways of thinking, their own ways of speaking.

If you mixed all those ingredients together, I’m not sure what the resulting accent would sound like. It might sound like Tom Brokaw. Or, perhaps, me.

November 11, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 46 © 2004 Metro Pulse