Patsy Cline before and after Idol

One of the American Idol contestants, Kellie Pickler, did a Patsy Cline song last night, "Walking after midnight". Pickler is from North Carolina, and her performance included some expected and unexpected vowels. The theme for the night was "songs of the 50s", and Pickler usually chooses songs that let her infuse the country flavour she favours - hence, she went for a 50s country song. Of course, modern country music is very different from that of Cline's era, and one of the less obvious aspects is the vowel space of the vocalists.

The song begins with this:

I go out walkin
after midnight
out in the moonlight
just like we used to do
I'm always walkin
after midnight
searchin for you

Pickler's accent typifies the Southern Vowel Shift, which includes an exchange of the nuclei of the vowels /i/ and /i/, so that /i/ comes out as [ɪy], and /ɪ/ comes out as [iə] or [iyɪ]. A similar exchange occurs with /e/ and /ɛ/, which become [ɛy] and [eyɛ] respectively. Meanwhile, /ay/ becomes a monopthong except before voiceless consonants, and /u/ and /o/ are both made diphthongs with fronted nuclei. These features appear strongly even in song, to an extreme with Pickler; unfortunately I don't have a recording to exemplify it, as it's hidden behind a pay-for membership on the show's website.

Cline was born in Virginia and spent much of her adult life in Nashville, and her accent just sounds milder than Pickler's when she sings - I believe because few of the features of the Southern Vowel Shift appear in her songs. She does show the contextual monophthong for /ay/, i.e. everywhere except before voiceless consonants, like in the next few lines:

I [a:] walk for miles [ma:lz]
along the highway [ha:wei]
well that's just my [ma:] way
of sayin I [a:] love you
I'm always walkin
after midnight [nayt]
searchin for you

All these monophthongal [a]s are pretty front - almost [æ] (well, they line up with my own vowel in bad, which is retracted). Nothing else really jumps out as very Southern, except perhaps a slightly fronted vowel in love and just. There is also a bit of a front onglide in the [u] of words like do and moon, but the nuclei for these words (and in you) are really back - not the centralized [ɨw] you would hear from Pickler.

Then in the third segment, some of the rhymes involve /i:/, prime Southern Vowel shift territory:

I stop to see a weepin willow
Cryin on his pillow
Maybe he's cryin for me
And as the skies turn gloomy
Night winds whisper to me
I'm lonesome as I can be

In Cline's recording, the /i/ of maybe and be may have a very slightly laxed nucleus, just enough to notice. But in see and both examples of me, the vowel is more steadily [i:]. In Pickler's version, the /i:/ of all these rhymes was a huge diphthong, the nucleus of which was retracted beyond [ɪ], perhaps to [ə] or even [ʊ]. Again, I can't get the recording to illustrate.

That Pickler would sing a Patsy Cline with an accent unlike Cline's is no suprise, given their distance in time and space. But there's one oddity in the way Pickler produced the nucleus in the first syllable of the word searchin. The word is repeated throughout the song, and each time she produced something like [ɛʁ]: a lax front vowel followed by uvular /r/, rather than just a nucleic [ɹ] that any rhotic North American accent would use.

Where did this [ɛʁ] come from? It's not at all typical of Pickler's or any American's accent. It also doesn't sound like Cline's production of the same word. The only thing I can think of is that maybe Cline's searchin has some central vowel nucleus (say, [ɜ], the open-mid-central-unrounded vowel) followed by a rhotic offglide, rather than a steady [ɹ] nucleus. And then Pickler, trying to include some sort of emulation of Cline in her performance, tried to replicate this Cline's [ɜɹ] and ended up with [ɛʁ]. Meanwhile the uvularity of the /r/ (if that's what it was) is either a byproduct of its context (between a central vowel and a palatal consonant) or a perceptual illusion on my part.