Do Singers Have Accents? (minicast)

Welcome to another summer minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

We’re on summer hiatus, but we’re sharing a few calls with you that just couldn’t wait for a new season in the fall.

Helen from Indianapolis wanted to know why people seem to lose their accents when they’re singing.

It’s a great question and one we get a lot, so we gave it a shot.

Happened to be at a store the other day and heard some old Beatles songs, and something in my mind just kind of came into play that I had thought about previously was how the Beatles, when they’re singing, or how any of the British singers or groups or Australian singers and groups, for example, when they are singing their songs, they sound very much as if they’re Americans from the U.S.

What song did you hear?

I was actually singing a song probably around getting close for Valentine’s Day, a puppy song that the Beatles had done.

And I just thought, well, why is it that when they’re singing that they sound as if they’re born in the USA here?

This is a popular question, isn’t it, Martha?

It sure is.

I think, you know, Helen, we get this all the time, and I love talking about this question.

So I’m going to just invite the both of you to shut me up if I go on too long.

All right, Helen?

Okay, Helen, have we got a deal?

We do, Martha.

I agree.

We’ll let Grant take over.

Oh, no.

No, I’m not taking over.

No, the agreement is to shut him up.

All right.

They’re like, oh, wait, 10 seconds. That’s too much.

No, I love hearing you talk, Grant.

Go ahead.

There’s a couple things, Helen, here.

First of all, the reason I asked you which Beatles song you heard is because it matters.

The Beatles had this particular thing once they became popular in the United States.

They played the Ed Sullivan Show, and they sold a million albums, and there were 14-year-old girls fainting in front of their hotel, that sort of thing.

They did some experimentation, and they took on some American accents for some of their album.

They flattened their liver puddling accents that they were using at the time, and they consciously went out of their way to change their voice.

They took, in some cases, a kind of more R&B voice or a blues voice or imitated some of the American rockers that they’d come to know personally or they’d come to respect.

And so there was something consciously happening there.

Now, if you listen to the original albums, the first songs, the first hits, those sorts of things, they’re very distinctly British, aren’t they?

Oh, yes, yes.

Looking back, remembering my youth, yes, they were.

And they’re different.

I mean, they matured so fast as a rock group.

It’s amazing to think that some of these albums are only five years apart, and they sound worlds different.

They bridge that gap from kind of an innocent 50s sound to like a worldly, world-conscious, like 1960s sound, just amazing stuff.

But the thing is, the Beatles aren’t the only ones that do that.

The best singers can do that with their voices.

It’s a concerted effort.

First of all, they write lyrics that may or may not be specifically British.

Like they can use British phraseology or British slang or not.

They write music.

They hire musicians.

They do rehearsals.

They choose a studio.

They do a bunch of takes for each song.

All of these stages along the way are conscious stages.

It’s not like this is just coming out of them on the spur of the moment, and they’re just happening to sing with this kind of accent that may or may not be British, right?

It’s planned. It’s organized.

This is what they call performance speech in the linguistic professions where they discuss and talk about language, right, Martha?

Well, I’m thinking of the opposite of that.

I mean, I don’t know why, but I’m thinking about that song by the Carpenters where they say, together!

They wouldn’t talk like that in real life.

Well, there’s…

They were American. They wouldn’t talk like that like British people. Why couldn’t they do the same thing?

They may have chosen to sing like that.

There are certain things that happen when you sing anyway, Helen.

Like, for example, there’s what they call a loss of roticity.

That is, you tend not to pronounce your R’s at the end of words as much as you might even in your day-to-day speech.

Also, the meter is different.

The rhythm is different. The tone is different.

You hit words differently. You accent them differently because you’re singing. Singing is not speaking.

And international performers like French performers and some of the Middle Eastern musicians that I listen to that sing in English, they learn it strictly phonetically.

They don’t even speak English at all.

They have this thing in France called yogurt English, where they say syllables that are kind of like English but aren’t.

And it’s a way of kind of getting across the idea of speaking English.

It’s kind of like…

Yogurt English?

Yeah, yogurt.

La, la, la, ooh, ooh, ooh, that kind of stuff.

In any case, the whole thing is here.

Don’t forget that they are performers, and many of them are skilled, and musicians can do many interesting things with their voice on purpose.

So somebody who’s a country singer might be sounding more Southern?

They might do a fake twang.

So it’s like acting?

Well, Keith Urban’s from Australia, and he sounds like he was raised in Texas.

Isn’t he?

That’s true. You do notice that.

I know a gentleman I work with who did a, he heard that I was inquiring about this and going to be interested in finding out a little bit more about it, and he said that actually when he was trained in a cappella choir and also he did some barbershop quartet and some other choir work for the symphony, that he was actually trained in how to speak in some other languages in some cases.

So he mentioned something about that very often.

They might be actually working with a linguist.

Right, exactly right.

Opera singers do this all the time.

They may sing an entire Italian opera and not know a lick of Italian.

But I have had the experience, U2, where I’ve heard a singer sing a song and then have heard them interviewed and have been shocked to hear a British accent or a Caribbean accent.

I mean, I think of Joan Armitrading, who’s wonderful, but I was shocked when I heard her speak for the first time.

Do you think she does this on purpose?

That’s the question.

Yeah.

If they sound too British, will their album sell in America and do they care?

I think that’s a great question. What do you think, Helen?

Well, I think people probably would care if they’re trying to market to the masses.

I would think the masses probably want to just as if they do in broadcasting.

For the most part, they generally say that the broadcasters have a Midwestern accent.

Right.

Because I think that’s probably the most acceptable type of accent across the country that people can understand without having to strain too much to listen to what the speaker was actually saying.

Well, it also might be more acceptable.

There’s no stigma against it where you might find a very rural or very southern accent or a very New York accent.

People might think they might have these unknown biases against something that’s too extreme, right?

Right. So, Branton, what you’re saying, in other words, is that it’s not going to be consistent, that British singers aren’t always going to sound like they’re Americans.

It depends on who they are.

There are two things at play here.

There’s a conscious effort to change their voice.

And then there are the things that happen just because you’re singing.

And there are certain things that we lose when we sing that do occur in spoken speech, like tone and meter and rhythm and stress and the pitch of music are different in music than they are in speech.

It makes a difference.

Anyway, what exit do you take when you sing, Martha?

Probably more southern.

Yeah.

What about you?

Madonna tries to sound British, so I try to sound like Madonna.

Before you start writing those outraged emails, I had it wrong in the call.

Keith Urban was born in New Zealand, not Australia.

Most of his success before making his mark in the U.S. was in Australia, however, which is where I got confused.

Sorry.

You can find more links and more information about singers losing their accents on our website at waywordradio.org.

Including more information about yogurt English and the Beatles accents.

There you can also listen to full free past episodes of the show.

We also welcome your calls at 1-877-WAYWORD.

That’s 1-877-929-9673.

And your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s all for this summer minicast.

For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

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