"Pants on The Ground" redux

[Wilson Gray]

I've finally gotten around to watching and listening to this song. And
I, as were many others all over America, touched by the moving
performance, a cappella, by "General" Larry Platt, of his own,
original folk-composition.

WRT his pronunciation, I was totally amazed by his
fingernails-on-a-slate-blackboard pronunciation of "ground" as
something like "grigh-own" by someone within a dekkid or so of my own
age. I knew that this pronunciation was sweeping the (young) South,
like that thing, the bacon fat (cf. iTunes for Bacon Fat, by Andre
Williams) among today's linguistically-lost youth of whatever race,
creed, etc. But, dad-blame, y'all, this man almost as old as I am!
That wasn't cool *one* pound! Now, I have to get up off of my
long-held belief that wouldn't any real soul-brother be talking like
that. I wanted to believe that he was humbugging, shucking and jiving,
maybe. But there it was. I couldn't deny the evidence of my own ears.
It's messing with my mind.

Oh, well. What can you do? At least it wasn't as shocking as hearing
an *older-than-I* black man from my own hometown say "Da[l@]s" (cf.
iTunes for Dallas Blues, by Floyd Dixon) instead of "Da[LI]s."

His speech was uninteresting, otherwise.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org