Herb, please accept my apologies!

[Herb Stahlke]

Wilson,

Apologies accepted.  I wouldn't have suggested that Mo'town had to
train their singers to sound black.  Rather, Mo'town set high
technical standards all around, and that included vocal training.
Whether the r-lessness comes from AAVE or from learning vocal diction
has to come down to the r-lessness of AAVE reinforced by rigorous
vocal training, aside from the few who may have been r-ful.

Herb

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Herb, please accept my apologies!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm watching an old movie, No Way Out - the first Richard
> Widmark-Sidney Poitier buddy-movie - which I originally saw at the age
> of thirteen, in 1950. The movie's plot, which concerns racial
> violence, is, simplistically, that the white people of working-class
> Beaver Canal, annoyed because one of them "seen a boogie drivin' a
> Cadillac a mile long!", have decided to "jap" the laboring-class black
> people of Niggertown, in order to motivate the latter to give up their
> annoying biggitiness. Instead, the coloresd find out and ambush the
> whites. Or something like that. Consulting of the iMDB may be useful
> to anyone who cares what the flick is really about.
>
> IAC, there's a scene in which the Head Negro In Charge harangues his
> followers, firing them up for the coming race-riot. It was almost
> laughable, listening to this guy - Harvard Hasty Pudding, followed by
> Yale Drama? - tryina soun n ack, WRT to both spoken language and
> body-language - lak he spoatn t'be comin fum dih shkreet.
>
> Unreal!
>
> I *still* don't believe that Motown had to school its singers in
> sounding black. But I'm forced to grant that the idea that such
> training may have been necessary in random instances is *hardly*
> totally from left field. As is clearly the case, sound-patterns vary
> from speaker to speaker. There's sounding black - as that actor did -
> and then there's sounding the right kind of black - as that actor
> didn't. Another cogent example is the black neo-bluesman of the '90's,
> Robert Cray. He was black, had black voice, talked black, and sang
> black. But, despite all that, nobody was taking him to be the second
> coming of Lightnin Hopkin or Howlin Woof.
>
> BTW, contrary to what current popular belief would lead one to
> believe, the white people - abstracting away from the facts that they
> were actors and that this was only a movie - used [nIg@], though the
> movie is set in the North, about as often as they used [nIgr]. Quite
> randomly, seem lak t'me.
>
> --
> -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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>

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