The strange case of the American Accent Singing Default
Angie, Angie
When will those clouds all disappear?
Angie, Angie
Where will it lead us from here?
With no lovin' in our souls
And no money in our coats
You can't say we're satisfied
Angie, Angie
You can't say we never tried
Not my words, but those of Mick Jagger on the song Angie from 1973. Beautifully interpreted, if I may say so. But one thing you may have immediately picked up on is that Michael is singing in an American accent. Why is he doing that? We're so used to him singing that way over the last sixty years that maybe we take it for granted. But as a reminder Mick Jagger is not American. He was born in Dartford, Kent not Dartford, Mississippi in 1943. His father was a PE teacher and his mother was a hairdresser who was active in the Conservative party. He did not emerge from the swamps of Louisiana.
So I repeat. Mick, why are you singing with an American accent? It's time to take a medium-sized dive.
The Medium-Sized Dive
It’s to do with sustained vowel sounds. When you speak you don't sustain vowels. When you sing, you often do. Aaangieee. It's to do with the melody, the intonation and the rhythm of the music. And sustaining vowel sounds erases the distinct accents which largely come from clipping or drawling consonant sounds.
It is not so much that British singers adopt an American accent, rather a matter of simple elocution.
When you sing what are called the unvoiced consonants (k, t, p), you are lengthening and adding resonance to sounds that are very short and quiet in normal speech. In other words, they move toward their voiced forms (g, d, b), so if you sing the words ‘keep it’, it begins to sound like ‘geeb id’.
A generic American accent, when compared to a generic British one, does more of this unvoiced > voiced consonant shifting. Australians do it too. When my children were small and we were sitting at the dinner table, one of them would say “Pass the waadder”. And I would say “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Would you like me to perhaps pass the water?”
So when a singer sings in a certain style, like Adele for example, he or she naturally will sound more American, not because they’re necessarily imitating their accent, or because they were influenced by it, but simply because technically it’s the default option.
So, the scientific explanation seems to be that non-American singers don’t sing in an American accent, but rather in a generic “pop music” accent. It would be very hard for Mick Jagger to have sung Angie any other way, given the choice of melody. It would seem like a strange parody to have tried it. A good example of just such a parody is Peter Sellers, the comic actor, singing A Hard Day’s Night in a pure Shakespearean delivery.
So, case closed?
Well, not so fast. It’s time for an entirely reasonable discussion.
The Reasonable Discussion
#1. It’s not just about unvoiced consonants. There’s the cultural context too.
Some would argue that it’s less about unvoiced consonants and more about the cultural context. Consider the following.
It’s Britain. It’s the 1950s. Chocolate has only just come off the ration. Clothes are still rationed, so you buy one dark suit which will last longer and will show fewer marks. Television is starting to come in but there are as yet just two channels. London has recently been the victim of the Great Smog which took 10,000 lives. Despite the Prime Minister telling everyone they’ve never had it so good, it sure doesn’t feel that way. Everything feels functional, grey, joyless.
There are glimpses however of another country. One that is bright, brash and extrovert. People remember the GIs that were around during the war. They start listening to the shellac discs that come as ballast in the holds of ships. They go to the movies, which are booming like never before or since and are captivated by visions of a more vibrant, colourful world. Post-war America.
From this world burst Elvis Presley, Little Richards, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. In the absence of the American performers themselves, British performers tried to imitate them. Sometimes they overdid it, becoming more American than American. Have a listen to Guy Mitchell’s version of “Singing the Blues”, then Londoner Tommy Steele. Tommy sounds absurdly more American than Guy.
In England after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it became aspirational to adopt the language of the conquerors. It bought certain benefits. If you were a man, you were more likely to be chosen for a job inside. So the words for live animals remained as the old Anglo-Saxon words, pig, cow and sheep. Meanwhile in the warmth of the kitchen the chef would be preparing the Franco-Norman words for dead animals pork, beef and mutton. Same deal in the ‘50s and ‘60s with singing in an American accent.
But, but, but, which is it? Physiological or sociological? There is another way of answering the question. If singing always makes everyone sound American it should be true of other genres that didn’t come from America. Is that true? Let’s find out!
#2 Not all singing gravitates towards an American accent. Opera doesn't, for one.
First, let’s talk about opera. According to my research, all opera songs pretty much sound the same, phonetically speaking, even though some are in Italian, some German, some French. The main reason for this is the power and volume required to project over the top of an orchestra and to the back row.
So seemingly when you’re trying to project your voice, as you very much have to in opera, it limits the number of vowels you can effectively produce. Consonants can be affected too. Uvular Rs for example (the French R if you prefer) – the equivalent of gargling without any water in your mouth - is nigh impossible to sing in an operatic voice, so they generally either roll it or use a sound close to that of the English R.
Singing opera successfully is an incredible achievement, but it’s also an artificial sound born from many years of constant practice and designed to fill a concert hall. That’s not how people sing in the car or the shower. And so, it doesn’t sound American. It doesn’t really sound like any particular language, though Old Italian comes closest. Interestingly the American singer Lana Del Rey sometimes adopts an operatic style such as on the songs on the album Born To Die and effectively loses her American accent.
So, not all singing gravitates towards an American default. Perhaps opera is an outlier. Let’s run the rule over those other genres.
#3. Here are many other examples of not singing in a US accent
The reggae and dub music which comes out of Jamaica sounds, to my ears at least, specifically Jamaican. It’s certainly not American. The old ballads from Ireland, the north of England, Scotland and Wales are identifiably from those areas. That music emerged organically and the accent and the songs ended up matching each other. These are all examples of non-pop and rock being sung in non-American accents. So, we’re getting towards the conclusion that it’s not singing that makes you sound American.
Maybe it’s singing pop and rock that makes you sound American.
I’d say if you want to sing a version of blues-based US classical rock, it’s going to be hard not to sound American. The Rolling Stones are the obvious example, but The Who and The early Beatles set the template. But we did an episode on The Kinks and they showed that it could be done. Britpop, as the name suggested, made it unusual to sing in anything other than a British accent.
An interesting contrast is the genre of French pop and rock. Well, there’s a big difference between the two. Francoise Hardy, recently deceased, and the other sixties girl singers found a unique and aesthetically pleasing female way of singing pop in a French accent. That authenticity can be heard in the English pop music of Saint Etienne who were influenced by that 60s French sound. Not so with Gallic rock music which has never travelled well. Johnny Halliday, perhaps the only French rock singer the rest of the world really knew in the twentieth century, complained that there were too many syllables in French to fit the genre. But then the French found a new, cooler way to express themselves through music, damn their Gauloises and croissants.
There’s no more classical US sound than hip hop and rap. But that too has evolved outside the US, in the same way that a new creole or dialect evolves outside its motherland. Take Dutch which has become Afrikaans in South Africa, for example. In Britain, the Bristol-based sound of trip-hop sounds English and Grime sounds very London. The Streets don’t sound American at all. Alternative music frequently adopts the music of the city from which the band hails, be that Alex Turner for the Arctic Monkeys, Mark E Smith for The Fall or Damon Albarn for Blur.
In short, I would say it’s about integrity and authenticity. Blur just can’t sing Parklife in an LA accent. There’s an interesting counter-phenomenon taking place whereby some American bands try to sing in a British accent to enhance their credentials and authenticity. Green Day do it, Phoebe Bridgers even has a lyric about it, posing this question of her then boyfriend Ryan Adams.
Hey, why do you sing with an English accent?
I guess it's too late to change it now
And that is a seamless pivot or segue to the last point I’d like to make which is about something the Germans are pleased to call sprechgesang.
#4 The evolution of singing into "Speak-Singing" - definitely not American
Anyway, this letter, I'll just post it back 'return to sender'
Unless you know him, I think...
I think he's called Mr. J Konopinski...?
Oh no wait, that's not an M that's a D
Dr J. Konopinski, do you know him?
Sounds a bit Russian to me... Oh! Polish, I see
And he had a PhD did he? What in?
Probably one of those pointless media degrees, not for me
University of life ya see, I got thick skin
School of hard knocks, gonna knock through that wall on Tuesday
Just in case you or the wife are gonna be in
From the song Fixer Upper by Yard Act. And, like the work of an increasing number of artists from the last few years in Britain, it adopts the technique of speak-singing or sprechgesang. Other artists in this milieu include Dry Cleaning, Sleaford Mods and Cool Greenhouse.
One observation I’d make is that the closer you get to conversational singing, the more options open up in terms of accent. When you speak-sing, you don’t have to worry about elongating your vowels. So you don’t worry about what accent you sing in – it will be obvious and instinctive. You can just be yourself. And I suspect that, possibly alongside some nervousness about singing ability, it just feels more genuine to speak-sing and sound less American. At the risk of straying into a more political sphere, it may also be that some American singers want to sound less American as well as British singers right now because they may be unimpressed with the way things are going in America. Though, it has to be said, the UK is hardly free from criticism.