The speaker studied in this dialect was an older, working-class white male with a rural background and little formal education who lived all his life in the Anniston area. He was interviewed with his wife in his home near Anniston in 1972, at the age of 81, by Crawford Feagin, who kindly gave me access to her recordings. He appears in her (1979) book as James Hays, interview #29. He is a deliberate and entertaining speaker, who tells stories about hunting squirrels and wild turkey, about strikes and the dangers of work in the foundry, and about why he ``didn't care nothin' about'' going out to (square-) dances. His life was typical of the 20th-century, industrial Southern U.S.
Feagin (1990:131) shows that older working-class speakers in this sample are mostly r-ful, as are most young speakers generally. She also shows (in press) that older rural males have relatively less of the Southern drawl (evidenced, for example, in up-gliding and in-gliding of /æ/) than women of their class. This simplifies the analysis below, since we may assume the presence of underlying /r/ as well as surface [, ], and since the considerable complexities of Southern gliding are minimized.8.1 It must be pointed out that this speaker represents past forms of this dialect, not necessarily current forms, since the dialect of his community has changed considerably since he grew up. It is also clear from Feagin's work that the amount of sociophonetic variation in the Anniston area was and remains considerable. James H. would be over 100 years old if he were alive today. This does not, of course, affect the theoretical interest of the phonetic effects found in his speech, which we may presume are characteristic of some dialect, namely that of speakers of his age and social background.