john fogerty, producer: this song about a louisiana riverboat man is almost perfect but it’s missing something, try it in a bugs bunny brooklyn accent
john fogerty, vocalist: big wheel a keep on toynin proud mary keep on boynin
john fogerty, producer: that’s it, that’s the take
A ton of US immigration ran through NOLA for a while. Immigrants would check in there and continue up the river (that’s how my Dutch ancestors got here on their way to Iowa).
Not to appeal to authority, but I think it’s useful to remember that Fogerty was coming up in a time where regional accents were literally 5x more distinct than now. Access was poor, but if you got access, you were getting the 150 proof stuff.
Preposterous yes. But true. I went to college three years in NOLA and they do indeed speak that way. But also, that was notorious egomaniac Fogarty doing an affectation
Or at least used to. I have no familiarity with the New Orleans area, but I'm assuming that any given distinctive regional accent in flyover country is being rapidly displaced by the astroturfed country music accent
Was recently exposed to a group of Wisconsinites, and the difference in speech patterns between anyone over/under approximately age 25 is absolutely jarring.
My parents both grew up in Wisconsin, and my cousins in my mother's home town had an entirely different accent than my parents/uncle/grandmother. So there've been a couple of shifts in living memory.
Used to skew more latter, now it's more of the former. Lot of "y'all", "fixin' to," pin/pen merger, and "ain't" where there didn't used to be, plus a distinct shift away from rounded vowels
30 years ago, I lived on the north shore (Covington), and my local friends would poke fun at the “Metry Bros” (folks who lived in Metarie, and would say “I’m from met’ree, bro” when asked where they lived), aka Yats.
Didn’t realize it until now, but yeah, definitely had a bit of Jersey-ish ring.
Maybe it was his effort at a New Orleans accent? Probably giving him too much credit though, we're talking Colin Meloy levels of authenticity regardless
If I had a nickel for every rock band with a Southern/hillbilly affect that was actually from a suburb just north of Berkeley starting with "El", I'd have 10¢. Which isn't a lot, but etc etc
a Cajun accent is nothing like a New Orleans accent though, and the latter does have a Brooklyn sound (Dutch influence!) but yeah Fogerty’s singing accent is definitely its own thing
There are some New Orleans accents that sound weirdly similar to a New York accent. I worked in Metairie for a couple months and my foreman was a local and I at one point even asked him if he was from New York.
Oh yes, thank you I just posted this. Journalist for the New Yorker, AJ Liebling wrote in his book on Louisiana politics, The Earl of Louisiana (on earl long) that there’s aspects of the New Orleans accents that descend from nyc
