Late McComb celebrity Will Price would be out of a job now. Here is why
Will Price, we no longer need your services.
Price was a native of McComb who taught Hollywood actors and actresses how to speak Southern as needed for their films, including “Gone With the Wind.”
He must’ve had an awful time teaching his wife to talk like us. She was the famed actress Maureen O’Hara, a native of Ireland. Price married her in a lavish ceremony at St. Mary of the Pines in Chatawa in 1941.
Price, the son of a local judge, grew up in a house at the corner of Burke and Aston streets in McComb. He died in 1962, so his services actually have long been unnecessary.
Today, or in the not too distant future, Price would indeed be out of a job because — attention please, roll the drums — the Southern accent is disappearing and we Southerners will be talking like yankees and Americans from everywhere. Thus, there will be no need for voice mentors in filmdom like Price.
This has all come to light In a perhaps surprising article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper on Sept. 21 by reporter Bo Emerson, who chronicled a collaborative study on our beloved accent conducted by linguists at the University of Georgia and Georgia Technological Institute, aka Georgia Tech.
The study “tells us that the Southern accent is disappearing. Baby Boomers still sound similar to their parents. But among Gen Xers, they discovered, the accent ‘fell of a cliff,’” wrote Emerson.
He added: “Bid farewell to the Southern twang. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But Georgians are high-tailing away from that grits-and-gravy drawl faster than a scalded dog.”
This was no lightweight undertaking. The research team of 70 graduates and undergraduates, led by the linguistics experts, “helped analyze hundreds of hours of conversation, recorded over nine decades, and uncovered this generational divide.” Only native Georgians were sampled in the review, taken from as long ago as the late 1800s to those born in more recent times.
“What they found is that the drawling vowels that typified Southern speech — even as recently as the 1970s — have vanished like the banana pudding at Sunday dinner,” Emerson reported.
One researcher, Margaret Renwick of the University of Georgia, said determining exactly why an accent disappears is difficult, it probably is because of exposure to other regional voices, like in ever-growing Atlanta where transplants come from not only across America, but the world as well.
The other main analyst, Lelia Glass of Georgia Tech, blamed it all on the “diphthongization” of some vowels, where an intended single syllable is stretched to multisyllabic sounds — like “dray-uss” for dress and “tray-up” for trap. Computers were used to model a tongue’s position during pronunciation of key vowels, Emerson reported.
Another culprit is the hick-sounding way we talk, i.e., “... people have negative attitudes toward Southern accents,” one professor noted.
All of this should be disturbing to natives of other Southern states because the new accents from afar will doubtless invade our cultural dialect.
I lived in Georgia and folks there do speak somewhat lordly, making others feel like they’re outcasts from outer space, like Alabama or Mississippi. However, I do recall one boss I had there saying, “You could put all these people in Albany, Georgia, in a bag with people from Jackson, Mississippi, and spill them out on a table and nobody could figure out where they’re from.”
One redeeming finding came from the study that should make Southerners feel all is not lost.
“Y’all isn’t going anywhere any time soon,” Emerson quoted researcher Renwick.
I guarantee y’all that Will Price rests better knowing that.
— Mac Gordon is a native of McComb. He is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Southerners no longer talk Southern MS column Mac Gordon McComb
