The Audio Library of
Classic Southern Literature
1676 to 1923
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| Introduction | Voices | Dialects | Readers |
Readers
Lee Ann Caldwell
It is difficult to unravel all the variables that may have created my accent. I am a native Augustan, so grew up in that relatively urban environment. In fact, my ancestors had been in towns rather than farms since the post-Civil War period. My siblings and I were the fourth generation on my paternal side of living in Augusta while my mother’s family had lived in the town of Swainsboro for several generations. My grandfathers had both died when I was a toddler, but my grandmothers were both college educated, trained as schoolteachers. My maternal grandmother earned a Master’s degree in English literature and taught until her retirement at Druid Hills near Emory University in Atlanta. She was a stickler for grammar and pronunciation, and thankfully always corrected us in any error we made. She lived to be 96 and was a great influence on my life. My parents were also college educated with Dad receiving his M.D. degree at the Medical College of Georgia. I attended southern schools but had professors from all over the country. My college roommates were from Indiana and New Jersey. In high school and college, I studied French for seven years, and in college took voice lessons and a course in Italian diction. So throughout my life, I have been around a variety of accents. While these post-high school influences are probably minor, they perhaps toned down what might have been an even stronger southern accent.
Tom Colechin
Born and raised in the East End of London, so a true 'cockney'. Those criminals from the Dickens novels like Fagin from Oliver Twist...yep, that’s "The Old East End". We still keep some of the old slang alive which in days gone by was used to trick and confuse the police. Your typical cockney will have a large, close knit family. Over the last decade or so many of the old school cockneys have migrated further east out into Essex where the old cockney accent and slang can now be heard. Tom is a brilliant Cassius in the production of Julius Caesar available here.
Walter Evans
A Georgia resident since 1972, he is a native of western Missouri, his parents and grandparents born in Vernon County, MO, where their forebears migrated after the Civil War from Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia; one ancestor served in the Arkansas legislature from 1856-59. He does not have the perfect voice to record “The Big Bear of Arkansas” but loves the story too much to let anyone else do it.
Brian Harrison
Brian Harrison was born in Atlanta GA and raised by Jamaican parents. Brian graduated from Ball State University in Indiana with a theater degree and began his professional career in Asheville NC and Jackson MS before returning to Atlanta. Among other things, Brian has worked as a narrator of audiobooks, a voice actor for children's musicals, and a puppeteer utilizing dialects, accents, and voice modulation techniques. In Atlanta, he spent some years with Georgia Shakespeare’s Will on Wheels ensemble Brian is a superb Mercutio in the production of Romeo and Juliet available here.
Greg Hatfield
A Kentucky native, Greg earned an advanced degree in Divinity at Emory University in Atlanta and has for many years been a minister at Trinity on the Hill United Methodist Church in Augusta, GA.
Jared Hegwood
I grew up in Southern Mississippi, in an odd mixture of Cajun-Catholic coastal culture and Faulkner-haunted dirt farms. I was born in 1977, but it might as well have been ‘67 or ’47 as my mother always told me that the definition of “Yankee” was anyone living north of Jackson, which sits dead-center of the state. I’m pretty sure she was serious. We were poor and mostly uneducated in the academic sense. Neither of my parents have college degrees. We worked multiple, multi-acre farms to fill the larder and freezer despite my father working in a grocery store. My mother made muscadine wine, canned figs and pickled squash. Church, too, comes into my accent: tent revivals, foot-washing and fish fries. Holy things. Fraudulent things. Story things.
Ethan Holliman
An eighth generation Georgian, Ethan earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Georgia Regents University and remains a resident of the small town of Dearing. His lineage is comprised of Quakers, cotton farmers, and blue-collar small businessmen of various trades. The primary speaking style that he came to emulate as a young man was the product of many church sermons that exposed him to the classic accents and cadences of Southern preaching.
Raheema Johnson
Has lived most of her life in Augusta, Georgia, where she graduated from Augusta State University and is recognized as an exceptionally talented actress. She earned rave reviews as Casca in Julius Caesar, available here.
Tere Luke
A talented actor who estimates he’s appeared in around 175 different productions, Tere spent most of his life in and around Augusta, Georgia.
Wayne Mixon
Was born and raised in South Carolina, earned his BA and MA at the University of South Carolina and his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina; for about three decades he was a professor and eventually Chair of the History Department at Augusta State University in Georgia.
Bob Rollins
Born and raised in Winston-Salem, NC, he graduated in English from UNC-Chapel Hill. Pursuing his life-long interest in acting, performing, and speaking, he trained at the Alabama Shakespeare Theatre, has appeared on stage perhaps 7000 times in plays and one-man shows, and has played over 50 parts—in many voices. He has lived about a decade each in Cincinnati, Alabama, and half again as long in Georgia.
Louise Shivers
was born and reared in eastern North Carolina by a father who mumbled and a mother who didn’t in a houseful of brothers and a cook named Lossie. 107 Warren Street in Wilson was a large and comfortable house teeming with so much life that Louise later said it was like living inside “You Can’t Take it With You” (Frank Capra’s screwball comedy). From an early age, Louise developed a love of music and literature—particularly poetry. She sang alto in the church choir and spoke softly and tenderly—sweet alyssum and balm for every psychic wound.
Tom Turner
a talented short story writer, has spent much of his life writing for, editing, and managing newspapers and magazines; he was born and raised in Blythe and has spent most of his life in and around Richmond County, Georgia.
Peggy Yonce
I grew up on my family’s farm near Johnston, SC in Edgefield County. Except for occasional trips to Augusta, I did not leave my home state until my senior year in high school. Consequently, I spoke the dialect of my parents, teachers, and peers. My mother was a stickler for good grammar, so I had the advantage of using correct grammar, though that often made me sound “odd” to my classmates. Even as a child I recognized that there were different pronunciations and idioms among my peers, variations depending on class, race, ethnicity, and even localized communities. It was not until I encountered the “larger world” in traveling on various church-related trips during my senior year in high school that I fully appreciated how different from others I sounded. I took a lot of kidding about my Southern accent, and at times found myself engaging in “linguistic chameleonism,” where I adopted the accents and speech patterns of my companions. For a brief time while living in New York when I had ambitions of becoming an actress, I tried to eliminate my accent through diction lessons. They didn’t work. Ironically, when I performed the role of Blanche Dubois in Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in Aiken, SC, the local reviewer commented that while Miss Yonce’s performance overall was quite good, it was too bad that the director couldn’t find an actress with a Southern accent! (She was not being ironic.) After college and graduate school in South Carolina and Georgia, I have remained in the Central Savannah River Area for some 45 years. I still speak “Southern,” I still am occasionally teased about it, but I am comfortable with my regional speech and see no reason to change.