For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.
I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.
My district goes a long ways across the southern part of Ohio, so just the opportunity to get to know so many people is a highlight itself, win or lose.
I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.
In 1984, I starred in 'Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan,' my first movie. My lines ended up being dubbed by Glenn Close, supposedly because my accent was 'too southern'. It was completely humiliating at the time. I became a laughing stock. I'm amazed that I managed to pick myself up and dust myself off.
I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.
The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to. It has a much more percussive rhythm to it.
The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.
If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.
