I'm-A Fixin' To Tell Ya

A couple of weeks ago, I read Dan Rather’s autobiography.  Or rather, I read two of them (I think he has three or four volumes out, so far).  I’d make a joke about this, but when I started this blog, I thought I might record a dozen or so stories, and am pretty close to four hundred or so.  Evidently, it’s hard for a Texan to stop telling a story. 

In one chapter, Rather talks about one of his first jobs working at a Houston radio station.  Being something of a country boy, Rather said he was lucky to have what he called a “standard Texas accent”.  By this, I can only assume that he means he didn’t sound like he was from the piney woods of East Texas.

There is more than one Texas accent, and almost none of them is ever heard in the movies.  When people from Hollywood try to sound like Texans, they nearly always fail.  Offhand, I can only think of three actors who get it right:  Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew McConaughey, and Renée Zellweger.  (And they’re cheating—all three are actually from Texas.)

This is why, of course, George H.W. Bush, President #41, does NOT sound like a Texan.  George W. Bush, President #43, does.  As a matter of fact, as far as I am concerned, W and LBJ are the only two presidents this country has ever had who spoke clearly.

Hollywood has spent a lot of time trying in vain to teach actors how to sound like a Texan.  It never really works.  While making Second Hand Lions, my favorite movie, a speech coach was hired to help Michael Caine lose his Cockney accent and sound like a Texan.  For some reason, they didn’t bother doing the same thing to Robert Duvall, who even after filming Lonesome Dove  and several other movies in Texas, still sounds like his roots: California.

In time, Michael Caine could pronounce every word in the script like a Texan, but only individually.  Collectively, the words still came out British.  “Your speech cadence is wrong,” the dialog coach said.  “You are pronouncing each word separately.  In Texan, the words kind of lean on each other.”

Another integral part of speaking Texan, of course, is the choice of words.  My brother reported that his wife, Barbara, recently said, “I’m going to go ahead and wait until after lunch to run those errands.”  This is perfectly acceptable grammar in Texas.

Even though Rather was blessed with a “standard Texas accent”, the radio station still had him spend long hours with a speech therapist.  He reported that he spent long hours trying to learn to say the word “posts”.  He could not pronounce the second ’s’ no matters how hard he tried.  (And neither can I.  Nor do I see the need.  If I say I drove my pickup through the ‘bobwire' and took out a dozen fence posts, you don’t need to hear that second damn ’s’ to know the cattle got loose.) 

Similarly, Rather had trouble saying the word ‘variable’—it usually came out ‘varble’, as in “the winds should be light and ‘varble’.  Texans have a problem saying any word that has more than one ‘b’.  This is why ‘probably’ comes out ‘probly’.  (Just saying these words in my head as I write this is making me homesick.)

I have served time with a speech therapist myself.  When I was twelve, I spent afternoons at school with a speech therapist who struggled mightily to get me to pronounce the word ‘four’ in such a way that it had fewer than three syllables.  She was not entirely unsuccessful, but she wasn't completely successful, either.  I now pronounce it with only two syllables and the words, "four", "for", "far", and "fore" are all pronounced in exactly the same way.

In Dan Rather’s case, he lost most of his accent over the years.  He was stationed in New Orleans, Washington, DC, London, Saigon, and New York—somewhere along the way he lost a good deal of that Texas accent.  Most nights, while he was behind the anchor desk at CBS, you could just barely discern the Texas accent of his youth.  But, when he semi-retired, his accent came roaring back, as thick and strong as yesterday’s coffee.

Nights were not dark, they were the “inky black of a crow’s wing”.  Politicians were as crafty as a hungry raccoon.  As soon as he could get away with it, despite having lived most of his life in the world’s largest cities, Dan Rather once again became a hell of a country boy.

Which is perfectly okay.  Every good Texan knows how and when to play the poor dumb ol’ country boy.  I do this myself.  It’s a useful tool to use on naive Yankees and other random pests.  (I can’t pronounce the second ’s’ on ’pests’, either.)

Don’t get me wrong, Dan Rather was not faking that accent like, say, the late Molly Ivins.  If you heard Molly talk, you would have sworn she was raised in a barn.  The truth is that was she born in California, and later moved to the richest section of Houston, where she attended an exclusive prep school for the wealthy, and then went to college in Massachusetts and Paris.  We can assume that she didn’t get into Columbia University on a calf-roping scholarship.

Molly’s patently exaggerated Texas accent always bothered me a lot more than it should have.  For many Texans—and this includes most of my relatives—they spoke as well as they could.  For Molly, it was a quaint joke:  she had as much of an accent as she wanted to.

When Dan Rather returned to Texas, his accent came back strong.  My wife says the same thing happens to me when I talk on the phone to my brother or when I am telling a joke or story.  There doesn’t seem to be much I can do about this, but several people over the years have sure tried.  For six years, my work study student, Natasha (who was majoring in speech pathology), tried in vain to rein in my accent.  Among other words that seemed to have really bothered her, she insisted that the word ‘naked’ should not be pronounced ‘nek-kid’.  I still think my way sounds more interesting, more dirty, more…well, naked.

Natasha took me on as a personal project, determined to ‘fix’ my accent.  She felt especially motivated when a Japanese exchange student came to my office after the first day of class.  “Please, sir,” she asked.  “Will you ever use English in the classroom?”

Nope.  I’m a Texan.