It may sound out of step with what Daniel's original question re 'singing in the wrong accent' ...however in the mid 18th century and particularly after the last main Jacobite Rebellion to the British Crown Scots- were banned from wearing their garb, from singing and playing of the pipes ( bagpipes) and were as the century wore on punished in schools for speaking in their mother tongue. A sense of shame or feelings of inadequacy about vocalising the English language was in some cases prevalent.. all over North Britain accents that strayed from Proper English... what some may think of as BBC English stopped many a career in radio and then television in their tracks.... Up until the mid 1980's it was rare to hear a regional accent in all its glory of which in Britain there are many a beautiful accent and dialect.......Nowadays across the media outlets , Radio, theater and TV it is and quite rightly so embraced and its great to hear National and regional language in all its glory .... So ..sorry my point is ... that some people who were schooled in the 60's- 90's may still , deep inside - hold onto the view that their voice and either dialect or accent is somewhat inferior ... unlike now where children have their voice and song celebrated in their regional and national tongue and so therefore are more comfortable, confident to sing from the pit of their stomach and sing loud and proud...... Like i said i may be well off the mark but thought i would share my thoughts on some peoples compunction to sing in other accents other than their own regional - national ones.... For me i love all accents and dialects across the world and because i am biased ( family from Yorkshire) ..particularly love the Yorkshire language and twang...... Peace out.... Gordon.....

@CliftonHicksbanjo

3 жыл бұрын

I was just interviewed by the German podcast, "Hallo Werner!" This problem came up, as it pertains to Southerners here in the United States. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia around black & white people who mostly had very strong accents. Consequently, when I learned to talk, my dialect was a mixture of black & white vernacular. Early on I became aware of this, and for some reason felt ashamed of it. So I remember actively suppressing my accent throughout most of my childhood. It wasn't until I began to play the banjo at the age of 13 that I began to feel pride in my heritage and my accent, and finally I began to embrace and cultivate my true Afro-Anglo Southern dialect. When I moved to Boone, North Carolina (where the accent is very different from that of southern Georgia) my accent drew attention--some good, some bad. One of the first times I sang publicly in Boone, I was told (to my face), "You sing like a n*****." To this day, that is the greatest compliment I have ever received.

@gogsalba4573

3 жыл бұрын

@@CliftonHicksbanjo wow... i just love that that was/is the greatest compliment you have had.... I see how my comment resonates with your early years experience.... Although i never mentioned it ... a lot of how accents and dialects were / are linked to what class people presume you are.. what kind of stock you are raised from etc... A working class voice raised in song and laughter is an authentic voice and once free from the shackles of restraint is one of lifes Joys to hear.... Keep on Keeping on... loud and proud ......a possible album title .:-)..

@richardphilpott1225

3 жыл бұрын

@@CliftonHicksbanjo Love it.

@LewisBurnerPugh

3 жыл бұрын

Very true. Accent is all tied up with prestige in England. For years, BBC didn’t represent any accent except for ‘received pronunciation’, eg. Queens english. They do a survey every year about the perception of accents and the Birmingham always ranks pretty low - this is mainly due to the fact that the only representation of the Birmingham accent people ever heard was from 70s radio show (I forget the name) where the ‘Brum’ accent was used by a fairly stupid person. So people get deep seated prejudices that last for years due to lack of representation!

@gogsalba4573

3 жыл бұрын

@@LewisBurnerPugh on a positive ... our ‘British’ children.. at least in Scotland are being encouraged to express themselves in their mother tongue and it is heartwarming to see and hear ... We are blessed on these isles to have many diverse and wonderful accents, dialogues all with their differing brogues and twangs 🤘✌️😎

This applies to fiddle styles too. In my early teens I started playing the hoedown music I had heard my uncles play and learned a lot from older players I met at fiddle contests. At about 20 years old I met a an older button accordion player from County Mayo, Ireland. He hosted house sessions and played for ceilis (dances), and I learned from lots of the older players. I always tried to keep my playing styles distinct and to not hybridize my fiddling. However, I was at an old-time fiddlers jam at a VFW in Salmon, Idaho when an old man drove his electric wheelchair right up to me and in a thick accent said, “I think I detect a wee bit of the Celt in your playing.” I’ve never tried to sound Irish when I sing, but one time I was singing at an Irish Fellowship Club picnic when a women who had just moved from Ireland came up and said, “What part of Ireland are you from?” No matter how hard we try to stay “pure” in our playing or singing I think we are influenced by everything we’ve heard as we are growing up. Okay, I play guitar more like Riley Puckett or Doc Watson in style, but Jimi and Carlos show up every now and then too.

About the accent, that's an interesting point. I'm a native French speaker and when I sing I have a way better accent than when I talk in English. I think it's because I grew up listening to American music and that when I sing I feel freer to shape the sounds the way I want and the way I often heard them. As for my native language, I often switch accents to be closer to the song's spirit and colors.

When I was a kid in Louisiana, we thought Creedence were our guys from somewhere down the road. Yeah, we garbled our words, too.

@olpossum5186

5 жыл бұрын

i think everyone thinks fogerty and crew were southern. i was surprised when i first learned they were from cali. but, country/southern accents would not have been unheard of in cali in the early 20th century, when lots of southerners and folks from the old west were moving there. all the okies moving there fleeing the dustbowl for instance helped create the country-style culture that led to buck owens and the bakersfield sound in country music, who of course is referenced in "looking out my back door". oh, and just looked up fogerty- his parents were from south dakota and montana, which of course means they couldve sounded more country than the native born surfer bros of california.

@PepperDarlington

3 жыл бұрын

@@olpossum5186 we spoke different in North CA. Plenty of leftovers from when folks migrated out west. Sayings and euphemisms carried over, especially in the Sierras where outside influence didn't come along until the Flatlanders started to move in. Fogerty mimicked the Gulf Coast/deep south accent but it wasn't fer off from how folks in that region sounded at the time. You can hear it in his singing if you grew up there.

As an english person, I think the American sounding accent comes out when singing because of the extended vowel sounds that are required for singing as opposed to talking. The beatles didn't exactly have a Liverpool accent when they sang. Also as an aside, West Country accents and American accents are closer to what traditional English used to sound like before received pronunciation.

@maxheinrichliebow

Жыл бұрын

Great point about The Beatles. They were huge Carl Perkins fans. Can you imagine some of those Rockabilly songs in a scouse accent....

Hey people, new community member here. If I could add a few slightly off-piste thoughts to the discussion regards accent/dialect/authenticity… I’m a Western Australian tenor banjo player and singer who plays music mostly from the Irish tradition. It was something that I fell into after years as a professional/gun-for-hire musician kinda scenario, and was rewarded with the irreplaceable direct transfer of knowledge from masters of the tradition (we’re lucky here in Perth). I am not Irish as far as I know: I’m a white, rural Australian, about four generations deep, with the chainsaw/budgerigar vernacular built in. The leader of my band, an Irish man himself, was plain and clear from the moment he let me sing a song - ‘Do not sing in an Irish accent.’ Clifton is right here, it will make your skin crawl. When touring with our band though rural Ireland, playing a lot of very small and remote pubs, the constant feedback was - ‘It’s so wonderful to hear Aussies singing our songs back to us’; ‘Can you play ‘The Pub with no Beer’; ‘I once met Slim Dusty… etc’. It took me by surprise, but as it sunk in I realised that my own culture, accent and vernacular were as interesting to an outsider as my personal fascination with the culture that I was seeking to absorb. Of course, the Australian dialect is an unwieldy, cumbersome and sour beast, but that’s our burden to bear. It’s entertaining to everyone else, or so I’ve been told.

If you're worried about singing in the "wrong accent", check out The Country Gentlemen play Matterhorn. I get a kick out of it every time. It adds to the song in my opinion.

The accent issue is an interesting one. I've had to approach it in a different way because I also sing and play Turkish music. Turkish is not my first language. Of course I didn't want to sing Turkish folk music with a strong American accent, because that is excruciating! My everyday speech there is mostly urban-Istanbul, though it's affected a bit by the Eastern music I've been listening to (and the people I hung out with for 14 years over there). The stuff I'm most interested in is from the East, and it really doesn't feel right singing it with an Istanbul accent. They don't have the kind of political correctness around identity politics that we do here in the US, so people mostly just appreciate that my pronunciation seems to fit the locality of the music that I sing. (More or less - just as there is not just one southern accent in the US, there are many regional variations there.) But in the US (I grew up in Iowa) people can be more sensitive about it. My mom is from the South, so I grew up hearing those accents and when I go south bits of it start slipping into my speech. So when I sing I'm conscious of some of it happening in my singing too. But I certainly don't want someone from the South hearing me and saying "oh, he's faking it." And who wants to sound like "Julie Andrews sings American Folk Classics?" What I do notice about different regional pronunciation--and what helps resolve it for me--is that local accents also have what I call "voice placement." People in Seattle speak from a different place than they do in Appalachia, or Alabama, or Texas, and that also affects the tone of the voice in singing. So (this is getting complex...but it is complicated so so be it), I try and compromise by paying attention to where the singing style is placed. Is it a strident tone, is it more open-throated? How about ornamentation? What is it about the singing style that moves me, beyond just the melody? I think that's more important than the actual vowel pronunciation. Just as in playing, listen to lots of artists and their vocal styles will affect yours; eventually you'll develop your own. That way you should find something that works for you, is not faked, and rings genuine, because it is.

I know this is an old video but I just had to comment on this. I'm from Massachusetts but I grew up listening almost exclusively to country radio, where of course everyone is from the south. When I sing I do have a tendency to unintentionally pronounce a lot of words in a slightly southern way. It just flows in music better.

If a song is wordy I practice speaking it, especially if it doubles as a fireside story. Ultimately it helps me develop my own speaking rhythm for the song and fit it better into my accent as well. I’m from North Florida with a very slight southern accent so if I sing some songs exactly how I hear them it sounds like I’m making fun of people to the north of us.

I'd say just sing how you like it, weather you use an accent or your own, how you like it is main thing. Also i learn tunes by ear and KZread, i might change little bits to how i like the tune.

One quick tip to help develop variations (not embellishments): Learn the closed forms of the chords in the song up the neck. You won't necessarily ever be playing those forms. but it'll inform you as to which notes on which frets are available to substitute. For example, if the song is played in an open G tuning, the F-form of G on the third fret will show you what other notes on the fretboard can be employed for your variation. Or, in the same tuning, by employing the barre form of C on the fifth fret, you open up additional possibilities for playing a passage in C. It's also a good way to learn the fretboard. I play old-time, often on a fretless instrument, so I rarely go beyond the seventh position.

As another Australian who loves old-time/mountain music from the US, but who can't tell any US accent from any other (except that hearing a rural West Virginian on KZread recently came as a bit of a shock), I am forced to sing in a fake US accent because my Aussie accent sounds completely inappropriate for the songs. However it doesn’t seem to matter, because anyone who can hear me is most likely just another Aussie (or a Pom) with just as vague an idea of regional differences in US accents as I have. Anyway, I love your singing and banjo-playing, Clifton. To me, you are the best.

Hey I just love these “lessons” you’re doing...just wanted to say that.

A wise man is Clifton.

About the accent , most British artist do sing in a American accent if they are singing country music,i think they have a legitimate argument that the song has to sound right.also there’s certain words that are pronounced quite differently which does make a song flow that much better.thanks for your lessons you are a fantastic teacher

I love your style. And the song at the beginning was so cool!

Clifton, I feel that you're spot on with your insights and advice on this topic. You give encouragement, share your insights and wisdom without imposing them on the listener, and I imagine that when you are teaching someone you look for ways to connect with what motivates and interests them. I find that what you share is applicable to any instrument.

Rockin hook n line

For the guy who wants help learning by ear... Get Brad Leftwich's book and CD on Round Peak fiddle. Throw away the book and download every tune on that CD and create a playlist: A tunes, D tunes, and G tunes. Then, once you have the isolated fiddle tracks downloaded, put on your headphones and play along with the fiddle. Try to open the tracks in VLC (if you have a Mac), so that you can slow them down to 50-85%. My advice is...don't play along to banjo tracks...play along to fiddle tracks. Because your time spent as a banjo player will not be spent in the real world mimicking other banjos, it will be following fiddlers. I say all this because that is what helped me bridge the gap between amateurism and professionalism. Now I can play with the best fiddlers in the country and make the fiddler feel heard and supported. Best of luck!

I'm English but struggle to sing American country/folk/bluegrass songs with anything other than a phoney mild American accent. They just sound wrong in my normal English drawl, probably wrong to an American too but it's a habit I've developed over 40 years and comes natural to me. I've developed my own style over the years and push that style on every new tune I learn by ear. I think just copying a professional's tab will end up with a quality piece but it's not reflecting your own personality at all. Ok, my arrangements lack the pro tabbed embellishments but anyone that knows my style would associate a particular piece to me and that's more important I think. I'm enjoying your channel Clifton, thanks...👍

Playing by ear. The 1st step is matching the tuning. Once you get your instrument in tune with the song, it becomes easy to figure out the chords / picking pattern.

Hi Clifton, The accent thing really interests me. I’ve played music since I was 10 but took up singing much later (maybe 8 years ago) and it’s been a journey. I started imitating phrasing and accents of people like Hank Williams, singing a little nasal etc... but it was unconscious. Like you say Clifton, it’s just from absorbing American music over the years. When I became aware of it, I decided to try and iron it out. It’s amazing how deeply ingrained even the vowel sounds are, of which you wouldn’t (being from Yorkshire) pronounce that way when speaking! It’s a real point of contention to me - I accept that some sounds/soft vowels can be more euphonious, and people can sing however they want, but when it’s an English dude REALLY going American, it usually sucks. But I don’t wanna hate on anyone either! On the flip side, being ‘too Leeds’ when singing doesn’t work for me either. So I try and keep it fairly neutral. So it’s starting to sound a bit more like me which is all I wanted. The playing by ear thing - it’s how I’ve always learnt (I’m allergic to tabs, hate to admit it!). One tip for this people might find useful is actually singing the notes/riff/embellishment you are trying to figure out, with the instrument in your hands, then trying to find the notes. Helps with singing too. Big love to the banjo community. Lewis.

The important thing, to me, is authenticity and realness when singing. Whatever feels natural and comfortable should be what’s best, even if it doesn’t technically make sense in the context. I also think it has the capacity to sort of show off the influence other people’s music has on you. For example, I’m from New Jersey. I have a pretty thick Jersey accent when I talk. But my singing sort of takes on a vaguely southern accent, just because of what I listen to-that is, folk and country music that’s mainly from the southern United States. I don’t actively try to imitate singers I listen to, but certain inflections will bleed into my singing anyway. Am I from the South? No, but Southern musicians have had a large enough impact on me that I sometimes start to sound like it. And I think that’s cool, honestly. It speaks to how deeply these folks’ music can get into us.

@bobbycarty7343

3 жыл бұрын

Its great Jack...but try a verse or two of Burns poetry in the "queens english" , You would get thrown off the premises :-)

hahahahahha An amazing subject Clifton....i,m from East Central Scotland and i can travel ten miles east ,west. north or south and the accent,s are all different . I was over in the states a few years back , and i had no problem with the accent.,s ..but nobody could understand a word i was saying .hahahahaha . You could fit the whole of scotland into one state in americas but we have dozens of various accent in scotland .I loved the southern USA accent (which i heard many of in disneyland ) I can tell the difference between the southern usa and new york accents . Thanks for all the entertainment you put on you tube ...i have been learning the banjo for 6 months now and its starting to come together. i got a banjo over 50 years ago and there were no teachers in my area...infact i had never heard the banjo played live ..(i have still never heard the banjo played live ) .so i ended up selling it ...sure we have plenty bagpipe teachers ( i must be the only scot who is not to keen on bagpipes ) maybe because i hear them most days since i was born .hahahahaha ...keep up the good work Clifton .

Late to the discussion but I'm in a similar situation to Adam, mostly self taught and learned from tablature. I'd love to hear other people's experiences with learning by ear vs. tab. My favorite traditional song to play is Darling Cora, and it's not a coincidence that it's one of the few I learned to play by ear (from Clifton's version on a small fretless). There's no other traditional song I play that feels so natural and no other I sing with more feeling. This is partly because it's just an amazing tune and song, but also because what I play evolved organically from my own sensibilities, as opposed to learning it by rote from tab. Long story short, learning by ear pays off (though I don't follow that advice enough myself). P.S. More minutiae about how learning Darling Cora by ear led me to approach the song with more creative freedom: 1. It's the only song I play where I switch between up-picking and overhand, which is a result of Clifton's style. While Clifton plays thumb lead, I play the first two verses index lead, which feels more intuitive for me. If I learned it from tab that had the thumb lead tabbed out, I don't think I would have been like "the hell with that, I'm doing index lead". 2. I combine different verses from different versions for singing. I could do this for any song, tab or not, but learning by ear put me in a mindset that I could alter the lyrics however I wanted. Tangent: The story of Darling Cora is dramatic and unique. The male character is the one with a broken heart lamenting the loss of a lover, and the female character comes off as a real bad ass. 3. Clifton uses gCGCC. I don't like changing tunings so much, so I kept my banjo in gCGCD. The resulting pluck of the open D-string gives the song a different feel -- not better, just different. If I had learned from tab, I probably would have stuck to the designated tuning, instead of allowing myself freedom to experiment.

I can usually tell the "folk" revivalists from the real deal southerners singing mountain music their playing was always good but their vocals leave a lot to be desired, always bugged me...Pete Seeger for example

Rockin

I've been playing for about 6 years. I still use the tabs, but I have tried to learn a song by ear. It didn't work out to well. I have tried many times to just tune by ear and that didn't work eathier. However, I have been able to take tabs and change them a bit to what I thought sounded better to me. I'm hoping that as I continue through the years I can play by ear.

@CliftonHicksbanjo

5 жыл бұрын

Well, that's OK. Six years is not terrible long. I started out learning with tabs and couldn't figure anything out by ear. After I'd been playing for two or three years I encountered George Gibson's "Last Possum Up the Tree" album and I just _had_ to play like that--but there were no tabs for his rare versions. I knew that isolated banjoists in the early days did not have tableture to learn from so I figured, "If they could learn by ear so can I." The first track on the CD was "Last Gold Dollar" and the liner note listed the tuning as gCGCD. So, I tuned my banjo and played the track. That song starts out with two heavy bass notes--after a while I figured out that those two bass sounds came from picking the 4th string open. The third sound was also a bass note but seemed to slide from low to high--he was sliding from the 2nd - 4th fret on the 4th string... &c. &c. &c. Once I figured those two little mysteries out my mind *clicked* and I stayed up _all_ night figuring out the rest of the song. Around 5am my mother walked down the hallway and asked me what the Hell I was doing still up. I played and sang the song for her (the first time I'd ever done so) and she had tears in her eyes. It was very difficult to pay attention in school that day because, from then on, all I wanted to do was learn new songs.

I think learning to sing in your own accent is a worthwhile project. Try it, research the area’s traditions...you’ll learn some interesting things!

Fascinating question. Rules, such as one must sing traditional music in the correct accent, are often made up by folk-club purists, academics, and urban intellectuals who do not come from a rural tradition (Ewan Maccoll, who was so "authentic" that he used a stage name, was notorious for this). These rules, while intended to preserve a tradition, end up becoming oppressive. I was once ostracized for playing a blues song in an (American) Irish bar, being told, "That's not Irish!". Ironically, none of the people who were giving me a hard time were themselves Irish, or even Irish-American. My own opinion is that when the music comes from the heart and is presented with confidence, it will sound good.

with guitar, learning most songs by ear was actually pretty easy for me. however, when I decided to try playing the banjo I found that I had to slow the video down a lot just to get one lick because they're all so fast. sometimes I just have to use tabs because my brain isn't wired that way.

I've done quite a bit of recording and find that if you record your performance and you listen back, you soon work out which words your singing that doesn't sound so good. I'm UK also, I work hard not to get too heavy into my northern accent.

@CliftonHicksbanjo

2 жыл бұрын

My family was deported from Yorkshire in the 1700s. Let that northern accent SHINE OUT.

i have a bastardized Midwest Michigan accent with some Rural Arkansas tossed in there.. its a mess, but the only time I think an accent would matter is if you are performing a song like a show tune or a minstrel piece where the words are written in that type of dialect.

Trouble is if you start singing in your northwestern/Lancastrian accent you may start sounding like George Formby 😀

This has been a problem for me too. Tried singing some of these folk songs in natural Australian accent/talking voice.. it's nearly impossible or sounds very weird. And unfortunately there's not much to draw from in terms of traditional folk here anyway (colonialists were too busy dealing with sunburn) so it's either mimic irish/scottish or american.

The Beatles are relevant here. They did not sing with their Liverpool accents. I used to sing a lot of Carter Family and Woodie Gutherie songs and I most definitely 'coloured' my tone to suit the music. I believe the tonal quality does somewhat relate to the genre of music being sung.

@CliftonHicksbanjo

Жыл бұрын

I always thought it was a bit weird hearing those guys emulate that Deep South accent. I still do.

I think when it comes to folk music in the north of England, its likely to be flavoured with Scottish and or Irish influences. Whereas in the southern parts of England, its likely to have that Somerset and or Welsh influence. Most good tavern music of the 17th Century is more Bristol-style than anything else with a good lick of folk instruments. It survived in the Carib islands in the colonial days and pirate age. And of course, later, those generally escaping Britain and taking their cultural flares with them to the new world. Thats why so much of "old-skool" British culture is alive n kicking and well preserved in Appalachia. As for myself - who likes that old-timey sound and plays as such on the banjo, when I sing I tend to put on an accent. I cant bring myself to sing Waterbound with a cockney accent. Sounds like a Sex Pistols wind up.... I think Gogs Alba makes a grand point here also. There was a time when the News and the Weather on the BBC was spoken by a diverse set of people BUT all in one dialect. Trevor McDonald for example. They spoke in a way that a very small sect in a very small part of London spoke, yet represented the nation to the many. Is it relatable? And to many, even in London, sounded complete alien. Of what I know, London alone has about 3 or 4 different accents and dialects. Then factor in all the other major cities and towns on the outskirts and beyond. This also indicates, that a very select few have a full grasp of "correct English" while the rest of us know the standard sprach that gets us by in life. We are just fluent in confidently getting by. Sadly, the bias still exists. Where posher-sounding people think common-sounding folk are thick. And where common-sounding folk think scouse or Yorkshire accents sound backward or thick. Truth is, our London accent/s are only spoken by us in one tiny area of the country - whereas there is more common identity among the other dialects/accents/people of the country. So really, "correct" English is a debatable term.

The Beatles sang without their accent. They sounded American. We always thought that very curious.

@TheWooTubes

8 ай бұрын

A large part of accents is rhythm. When you sing music to a different rhythm, the accent gets hidden. Cilla Black toured with the Beatles but never lost her accent, though I've been told there are different male and female versions of the Scouse accent too and both are influenced by Irish accents because of being a port city.

@TheWooTubes

8 ай бұрын

I'm surprised nobody mentioned The Rolling Stones. They are suburban Londoners who listened to a lot of black Blues players.

Irish brogue? Scottish maybe. However, point well taken Clifton.

For what it's worth, the historical English accent actually sounded closer to today's American English than to a modern British accent. Non-rhotic English didn't develop in England until after the revolutionary war. So the inquirer's ancestors probably spoke and sang more similarly to how he sings.

I know this is an old post but as a student of colonial migration patterns I must add that most of the people that transferred or developed these songs grew up in Britain, Ireland and almost 1/3 of them were from Germany. In GB especially you get a different accent every 10 miles down the road and I have seen my closed caption translator tell me people from Yorkshire and Cambria were speaking no known human language. Immigration was heavy right up until 1900 with even Polish and Italian workers imported to work the coal mines. I am 70 and I assure you that the regional accents of today are not what I heard my grandparents and great grandparents speaking daily. Neither are the tones you play in your search for "traditional" music.

Totally understand what you are saying in the first question. Maybe try to exaggerate your own accent at first and then it will relax into where you want. Would recommend you watch the 'Unthanks' or even Chas and Dave - I know that sounds silly but they wanted to create a rock'n'roll that was London and not American and had to re-learn. Try recording yourself and watching it back and taking notes. Don't give up - it may seem silly; but challenges are were rewards come from.

Weird.................I just commented on the SS Stewart video how much I love the Kinks Muswell Hillbillies album. In my mind the Kinks and the Stones are 2 of the best country bands ever and would have not been so effective without the imposed accent. Jus sayin.

I’m from Northern Ireland and I too have adopted a southern American accent,, I’d love to have the nerve to sing with my own accent.Ulster Scot.

@CliftonHicksbanjo

3 жыл бұрын

Most of us American southerners came out of Ulster--there or just across the way in Northumbria or Strathclyde--so I think we'll give you a pass.

@ProfileP246

3 жыл бұрын

@@CliftonHicksbanjo So cool isn't it, I found that out not long after I started banjo 12 years ago. I immersed myself in finding out as much as I could about the south and I can tell you we're definitely the same folks, all the names even down to the sense of humour, my mother is into her genealogy and found some of our family did end up as mountain folk. Amazing to me! well if you're giving me a pass that's good enough for me haha! love your stuff man cheers!

👍🏽👍🏽

It is perfectly fine in my opinion to do the song in what ever way it feels to you. After all, you are self entertaining. I was once told by a note for note copier/player "that's not how Ralph Stanley does it". That's because I'm not Ralph Stanley, I do it my way. I often Change words or make up a new verse using a tune. Another guitar player told me I needed to learn Scruggs style. My reply, Well, if you learn Chet Atkins Style, I'll consider Scruggs Style. If you want to copy have fun and do it. Changing accents, words, what ever, if it's fun and you are learning, great.

The Beatles were asked by an American interviewer why they didn't sing with a British accent.

It seems to me that more often than not, English singers sound less specifically "British" when they sing than when they speak. I'm not so sure that the accent they fall into is necessarily "American," maybe it's just a generically neutral way of pronouncing words that makes singing easier - not really imitating anyone, just taking the path of least resistance.

Re: English and Irish accents: Stereotypically, don’t those accents often end with a sort of questioning affectation? Ending the phrase with a higher note? If the music goes down at the end of the phrase, raising voice doesn’t make sense. The Beatles “She Loves You” sort of has that but not many other songs. Just a thought. Nice video.

That is because the American South accent is closer to the pre-vowel shift than his British post-vowel shift accent.

Just Do Your Own Thing

If I hear an Irish folk song I want to hear it with an Irish accent. That is as important to me as the song itself. Same with a southern Appalachian song. I want to hear it in a southern Appalachian accent. Anything else would be out of place. IMHO

Interesting topic … A lot of white people singing blues will try to sound black. Is it wrong? Idk… not to me. Many of the 60s revivalists tried to make note perfect recreations of the old blues guys. Some sounded right and some didn’t.I guess as long as it’s relaxed and natural and coming from the heart it sounds good and right.

I was quite put off once when listening to Terry Gross interviewing John Fogerty on Fresh Air; she obviously thought that his pronouncing "turning" as "toy-nen" the way he did - putting on that southern thing - was somehow pretentious or phony. She was interpreting it through some sort of politically correct filter, in other words. And then in another interview with Donovan (one of the faves of my youth back in the day) she ragged him for his ultra vibrato! My attitude is hey - if you can play or sing or write tunes like those guys, then maybe you can pretend to criticize on such flimsy pretexts. Imagine employing this sort of "authenticity" standard to Bob Dylan (or Mick Jagger!) or - well there are countess others. Singing and playing music is, after all, a performance; an act. It's channeling other sources and other times and hey - even other accents if that's what you feel like doing. [By the way she also gave Robert Plant a hard time for singing what seemed to her silly sexist and misogynist blues lyrics in their music; his tactful and gentlemanly response was something like "well Terry, you know I was only 21 years old"].

At least english was his native language. Us from Latin countries Might have a bit more trouble. LOL

...the 'Accent' can be a Problem if you're interested in Mountain Banjo and come from the UK ....some songs you just can't get away with without sounding ridiculous and are better played as instrumentals...eg..Groundhog and songs of that type ....Seeger Style Songs you can get away with up to a point ....as far as singing goes I'm more at home with my Concertina singing our own Traditional Songs ! ... been playing the Banjo now for 50 years and learning something new every Day ....Thanks .....

@CliftonHicksbanjo

3 жыл бұрын

Check out this newly-released footage of Tommy Jarrel & Fred Cockerham: kzread.info/dash/bejne/m6mfz8Ruf7vFl8Y.html At one point they play "Groundhog," and Tommy sings it a little more English sounding. They also make fun of the modern hippy/festival version of the song, which is mostly all anybody plays anymore. I have a lot of fun singing old English songs in my regular old guttural accent. One thing I really want to do is carry the banjo to Britain and Ireland so I can play those for people and learn some "new" ones. Thanks for commenting.

@Brill39e

3 жыл бұрын

@@CliftonHicksbanjo ...thanks for the link ...hadn't seen that one before ....

Remember, people living two or three hundred years ago spoke differently than modern people.

Feels kinda shameful when you spend hours listening to and learning these folk tunes and the accent definitely feels like a natural part of singing many of these songs, but then you start talking to someone in a casual conversation and the accent sticks for a few seconds. I think I'm just susceptible to replicating accents, even when I'm speaking to other people I catch myself duplicating their accent in my own way. Seems to be a subtle part of our human connection with one another, you want to sound similar to someone... because you like them... simple as that. Far as music goes if it feels right I figure it must be right.