Small Town Southern Man: Comparing Southern Features in the Songs and Interviews of Alan Jackson.

A Southern accent is often seen as key to the performance of country music and to one's larger Southern identity. This work examines two Southern dialect features of country music singer, Alan Jackson, in two acoustic contexts: songs and interviews. The Southern accent features chosen for focus are the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) and /ai/ monophthongization. Our data show that Jackson displays fewer Southern features in songs, such as a lack of FACE/DRESS inversion. When interviewed, however, Jackson displays more markers of Southern identity in his speech, such as more intense back vowel fronting and inversion of FACE and DRESS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]