Should we just do us a shot at Jim Bean?

Just for old time's sake.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

I'm Amina Serna, filling in for Brian today.

And that was Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder on the FX series justified. If you've seen that show,

you know Crowders is a voice thick with history, menace, and humor, and even if you haven't seen

it, you can hear the music in his particular southern accent. But in real life, off-screen,

linguists say that voice is fading. Young people across the South are losing their

accents or learning when not to use them. As those accents fade, something else fades with them.

My guest is Annie Joy Williams, assistant editor at the Atlantic. She's a southerner herself,

and in a new essay called The Last

Days of the Southern Dural, she writes about accents she grew up hearing, about quieting

her own accent as a teenager, and about what disappears when a regional way of speaking slips

away. Hi, Annie. Welcome to WNYC. Hi, thanks so much for having me. And listeners, we can take

your calls on this. When does your Southern drawl come out? And when do you choose not to use it?

We can also hear your celebrations of the Southern accent. 212-433 W-Nyc. That's 212-433-9-6-9-2.

And I would say you can text as well, but I think we'd prefer for you to call on this one.

Annie, you open the essay with a description of your father's voice.

You write, his words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound

if it could speak, thick and slow. I love the way you put that. Why don't you tell us about him?

Where is he from? And where did you grow up hearing that sound every day? Yeah, my father is from

Georgetown, Kentucky, so kind of a small town, Kentucky, outside of Lexington.

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