The TV show Nashville, which premieres its third season on ABC Wednesday night, has gotten praise for tackling the Southern accent — or at least, not always completely butchering it. And as many movies and TV shows have shown over the years, this isn’t an easy task.
Attempts at Southern accents are often notoriously cringeworthy. One of the worst, many say, is Nicolas Cage playing a former Army Ranger from Alabama in the 1997 movie Con Air.
Warning – this Con Air clip gets pretty violent at around the 40 second mark:
Cage is from California. Connie Britton, on the other hand, who plays country music star Rayna James in the TV show Nashville, has a natural advantage: She spent a large portion of her childhood in Virginia.
“That was fortunate for me, because my ear was able to be very accustomed to that accent,” she said during a recent day of filming for the TV show. She lost it in everyday conversation when she went to college — but she slips back into it when she visits family, she said.
Difference In Dialects
Of course, as Tennesseans are well aware, not all Southern accents are the same. A Virginia accent is different from a Texas accent, which Britton portrayed for five years in the TV show Friday Night Lights — and that is different from a Nashville accent.
Britton said she made a conscious effort to have a different Southern dialect between the two roles. For example, she said, Rayna James doesn’t say “y’all” as much as Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights.
“In Nashville, you will hear a lot of times, particularly amongst musicians, people say ‘you guys’ instead of ‘y’all,’” Britton said.
Besides being from another part of the country as Tami, Rayna is also a completely different character.
“Her accent is more reflective of the more affluent Tennessee community, and yet it’s not quite as polished as that,” Britton said. “She was also influenced by the music community.”
Moving Your Mouth
Dialects are incredibly complex and nuanced, says Nettie Kraft, Nashville‘s dialect coach. Everything, from where we were born to who we admire to whether we went to college, goes into the way we speak.
“It’s a combination of psychology, economics, geography, religion, lack of religion — all of it. It’s all together,” Kraft says.
Kraft works with actors on the TV show, including Britton, to help them sound authentic. The variations between dialects should be subtle, she says, and a big part of perfecting one is just understanding how your mouth works — how to shape vowels and where to place the sound.
“You hear people say, ‘Oh I’m tone deaf, I can’t sing a note,'” she says. “I do think there is occasionally maybe an actor or two who are dialect deaf. They just can’t do it.”
Britton is not one of them, Kraft said — the actress was quick to pick up her casual Nashville accent. Britton said now she can adopt it without even thinking about it.
“Getting ready to play Rayna James just feels like putting on a really comfortable jacket,” she said. “When I start to read the character and even read the script, I always just hear her voice. And at this now that comes pretty organically.”
Britton said it helps that the show Nashville is actually filmed in Nashville.
“For me, the key is really just listening to the world around me,” she said. “That is one of the greatest advantages of working on location around the country,”
Rayna James, played by Connie Britton, is a country music star trying to start her own music label. Credit: ABC Photo
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