I was hunting down folk who sing with a Northern Irish accent for #ThePlaylist and was disappointed to find a lot of singers from here seem to suppress or downplay their accent. So, for St Patrick’s Day, here’s Foy Vance in the Bushmills Distillery with some very County Down vowels.
Wow, great performance, but amazing to me how the accent sounds just like a certain variety of stuff from the US, doesn't sound unusual or "foreign accent" to me at all.
@dlakelan That’s interesting, because to me that’s a very strong local accent. The way he sings “down” in the second line and “now” in the chorus are very characteristic of a specific area.
But then, I’ve spoken to Americans who think Liam Neeson’s American accent is great so now I suspect you lot just can’t tell the difference 😉
Foy Vance is good though. He’s like if Van Morrison wasn’t a massive twat.
Yeah, I can hear the "down" (sounds like "deern"). But I think you may also be underestimating the effect that Irish immigrants had on American music particularly in bluegrass. I'm definitely a bluegrass fan so that may play into it.
Here's like some random recent bluegrass that's not at all a good comparison but I definitely hear altered pronunciation vs american common english
So, let's go back to OLD school bluegrass, here, and these vowel sounds are very nasal and more similar to the ones you're talking about I think?
Ok, so my wife agrees with me about the songs. So we decided to look up an interview with Foy Vance, and listened to that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwEK6MafFEo
And my wife said basically that it sounds very much like a slightly different cadence to an Appalachian accent (which to be fair shouldn't be unexpected as the Appalachian area has heavy irish influence).
So now I gotta find you an appalachian person interview to compare.
So here are some absolutely strong Appalachian accents on display in interviews. (if you talk like this in the US you will be pegged for Appalachian immediately and people may have a hard time understanding you)
And while this seems much more extreme than the accent Foy has in his interview, I think there are clear similarities, and when you put these into song, they meld to something similar.
YES! ok, so I'm not just imagining things. And then, this is the same group of people who inhabit Memphis Tennessee and that's been one of the hearts of the american recording industry... which then influenced american "country" music, Rockabilly, bluegrass, blues, soul... and then travels again over the Atlantic to port towns like Liverpool, gets melded into the minds of the Beatles, and comes BACK to the US... So you can blame the North Irish for the Beatles ;-)
@dlakelan Jesus, isn’t enough we get blamed for terrorism?
(A joke. I respect the impact the Beatles had on music and popular culture but I find them completely unlistenable and I also hate pretty much everything Paul McCartney has ever touched. I think Mull of Kintyre is one of the worst songs in the world. I have gotten SO many people’s backs up with this opinion and it never stops being funny.)
Steph (crisis version)
Daniel Lakeland
PalmAndNeedle