Entertainment For Lively Minds
Does Frank Sinatra sound like Guy Garvey?
Since it was hauled up for inspection on here the other week I've been listening a lot to the Frank Sinatra album Watertown. In fact it's my new Favourite Album (Beach Boys Today is sobbing in the lavs and swapping notes with Hard Days Night and Songs From Northern Britain about what a fickle bugger I am).
Anyway there's a song on this album in which Frank sings the word "born" as if it was splelt "b o y e n". In another, the word "lawn" rhymes with "gone". He's sort of "playing" a character on this album so maybe he's playing up the New Joisey-ness a bit, but it's only just occured to me that Frank Sinatra sings with a very proounced regional accent. So, to American ears, does he sound like Guy Garvey?
And what are the other American equivalents of the Billy Braggs, Proclaimers, Cerys Mathews, Shack etc. i.e. people who either exagerrate, or don't bother to disguise, strong local accents when they sing?
And what do those British singers like Robbie Williams and Elton John who put on American accents sound like to Americans? What area are they presumed to be from? Or do they sound as silly as Dick Van Dyke pretending to be a cockney?
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I like
the idea of Robbie Williams sounding like an equivalent of Dick Van Dyke. That's made my morning that has.
Songs From Northern Britain
Oh, how I love that record. Helped me through a transitional phase, kept me bouyant. All hail the Fannies.
Bob Dylan's Hibbing accent
Dylan has always sounded to me as though he has a distinctive accent, when speaking and in his early singing. But I'm not American, and so I was never sure - perhaps it was just his individual voice. A journalist called Graeme Wood wrote an amusing article investigating this in The Atlantic. It's slightly inconclusive but he does come across an old schoolfriend and bandmate of Dylan's in Hibbing, Leroy Hoikkala, who sounds like him:
"Hoikkala said the Hibbing accents of that era were diverse and distinctive, and that they tracked closely the ethnicities of the immigrant communities in which they appeared. Hoikkala's, then, would have been a Finnish-American one, and if his is taken as a historical trace of Dylan's, we might say the Maestro speaks like a Finno-Hebraic Minnesotan, by way of Greenwich Village—which perhaps goes some distance toward explaining why we have heard so little of it before Dylan."
Full article here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/08/the-answer-my-friend...
Not so strange to have US and UK people sound similar...
...in some ways. Did you see that Melvyn Bragg show the Story Of English, in particular the episode where he illustrates the origins of the american accent ? MB went to a village in Lincolnshire (who's name escapes me, all apologies) where I think he said many of the pilgrims originated, and an obscure island/fishing village off the coast of Maine with a bunch of people who've been pretty much isolated for a lot of the time since the US was settled by Europeans. Not much contact, no TV or radio etc. The footage switched from the blokes chatting in a Lincolnshire pub to the island and back - the similarities were absolutely astonishing, and the obvious roots of the american accent were clear to hear. Till I saw that I had no idea there was such a strong single source for it, albeit subsequently influenced by many others over time and regions.