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Our elusive accent, Part 2

by Jack Neely

A lot of folks responded to the essay about accents, in which I raised the question of whether there is such a thing as a “Knoxville accent.”

Concerning the notorious Tennessee Flat, which may or may not be typical in Knoxville, a couple of readers brought up the paradox that it’s common in rural Southern Appalachia, but passes over Middle and West Tennessee before taking hold again in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and West Texas. Flat-I America is obviously a huge voting bloc, and I can’t help but notice that on those red-blue political maps, most of it’s solid red.

Future presidential candidates might do well to study it. A couple of readers brought up the well-known learning aid.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. It’s the Southern Appalachian version of “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” and, as a Scots-Irish East Tennessean myself, I can say it brings out the spirit and character of our people.

“It’s a rat nass nat fur a knaff fat.”

That’s a phonetic approximation of the Tennessee Flat. If you need that translated, just transpose long i’s for the short a’s.

Just to confuse things further, in that essay I mentioned Lowell Blanchard, who was as much as anyone the Voice of Knoxville in the mid-20th century. Announcing for WNOX for more than a quarter century, he was our most popular radio DJ and launched the totemic live-country radio show, “Mid Day Merry Go Round.” We even elected him to City Council a few times. He died in 1968, a much-honored and beloved Knoxvillian. But he was originally from Illinois and sounded like it. One old-Knoxville friend remembers Blanchard’s Chicago accent, which never left him. After a round of golf, Blanchard would head for the snack counter and order a hat dag. He never felt obliged to change his accent. In Knoxville, it would have been difficult to decide what to change it to.

One reader brought up the unusual usage of “I don’t care to,” which, in East Tennessee, can be a synonym for both (a.) “Actually, I’d rather not,” and (b.) “Sure!”

The reader believes the dual opposite usages to be a strictly Knoxville phenomenon. The positive meaning is the unusual one, of course, and I think I’ve heard it within city limits before, but I’ve heard it more in the countryside. As it happens, regional dialect scholar Michael Montgomery, professor emeritus of the University of South Carolina, has studied that particular idiom and discussed it in a speech he gave last week at the new East Tennessee History Center. He was in town promoting his new book, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. He believes the positive usage of “don’t care to” is native to the Smoky Mountains.

I spoke with Dr. Montgomery after his talk. As it turns out, he had once lived in Knoxville; he’s a graduate of Holston High.

I asked him if he’d ever thought about what makes Knoxville speech different. He admitted that he did not consider Knoxville speech in the book, and told me that, off the cuff, he couldn’t think of anything in particular that distinguished the “Knoxville” accent.

But then he thought of one thing that had indeed surprised him, watching the news on TV the night before. It has to do with what we call this place. Our local news reporters, Dr. Montgomery observed, pronounced the name of the city Knox-Vill. The scholar seemed genuinely puzzled about that pronunciation, which he regarded as alien. He asked me if we’d changed the way we pronounce the name of the city.

I told him, no, as far as I knew, we hadn’t. At least, if we had, no one had gotten the word to me. Sometimes I do get left out of the loop.

And it occurred to me that the correct pronunciation of Knoxville appears by phonetic spelling in what’s still the best-known Knoxville-based novel, James Agee’s A Death In the Family. But even that book raises interesting questions about what constitutes a Knoxvillian.

In the book, which is set in 1916 and believed to be strictly autobiographical, Jay, the young father who lives in Fort Sanders, dies in a car wreck on the old Clinton Pike. An anonymous person, apparently a Powell resident, in a voice “wiry and faint, a country voice,” shyly reports the fatal accident by telephone. “It’s right on the left side of the Pike comin out just a little way this side, Knoxvul side, of Bell’s Bridge.”

Later on, in a flashback, Jay uses precisely the same phonetically spelled pronunciation. But Jay is portrayed as a son of Campbell County, one whose accent is distinct from that of his wife’s family, who are prominent Knoxvillians but have Michigan roots. When trying to decide where to hold Jay’s funeral—Knoxville or LaFollette—the grandmother Hannah says, “I would have supposed that his home was Knoxville.” When the Michiganders in his family speak, the Knoxville-born Agee doesn’t use phonetic spellings.

Which raises an interesting issue. Since he draws attention to his dad’s pronunciation, but not his grandmother’s, did Agee consider the Knoxvul pronunciation the strange one?

In that quintessentially Knoxvillian novel, none of the adults are really from Knoxville. They’re from the Upper Midwest, or the East Tennessee countryside. Agee doesn’t give us much clue about how the few people who were actually born and raised in Knoxville pronounced the name of the place.

But I remembered that five years ago, when Garrison Keillor was here to do his national broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion,” he said, on the air, “It’s Knoxvul, isn’t it?” He proceeded to recite a limerick that rhymed Knoxville with “boxful” and “frocks full.”

Of course, the vul suffix isn’t necessarily a Knoxville thing. I suspect it’s common in Asheville, Nashville, Greeneville, Rogersville, here in this region which was settled during a time when British soldiers and British suffixes were despised, and locals favored French endings.

For what it’s worth, I say Knoxvul. But, as far as I’m concerned, the distinctive Knoxville accent remains elusive.

November 18, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 47 © 2004 Metro Pulse