8/17/2019 Why Do British Singers Sound American

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Why Do British Singers SoundAmerican?Blame the Beatles.By L.V. Anderson Posted Monday, Nov. 19, 2012

For the newest James Bond movie, Skyfall , English singer Adele recorded a song wit h the

same name. Though Adele speaks with a strong London accent, her singing voice sounds

more Amer ican t han British. Why do Briti sh vocalists often sound American when they sing?

Because that’s the way everyone expects pop and rock musicians to sound. British pop

singers have been imitating American pronunciations since Cliff Richard, the Beatles, and

the Rolling Stones began recording in the 1960s.*  These musicians were largely influenced

by the Afr ican-American Vernacular English of black American blues and rock and roll

singers like Chuck Berry, but their faux-American dialects usually comprised aspects of 

several American dialects. Imit ating an American accent involved both t he adopt ion of

 American vowel sounds and rhoticity: the pronunciat ion of R s wherever they appear in a

word. (Nonrhoticity, by contrast, is the habit of dropping r’s at the end of a syllable, as

most dialects of England do.) Sometimes Brits att empting to sing in an American style went

overboard with t he R s, as did Paul McCart ney in his cover of “Till There Was You,”

pronouncing saw  more like sawr .

Linguist Peter Trudgill t racked rhoticity in Brit ish rock music over the years and found that

the Beatles’ pronunciation of R s decreased over t he course of the 1960s, settling into a

tr ans-Atlant ic sound that incorporated aspects of both Brit ish and American dialects. The

trend also went in t he opposite direct ion as new genres developed: American pop-punk

vocalists like Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day took on a British-tinged accent to sound

more like seminal artists such as Joe Strummer of the Clash. Contemporary singers

continue to adopt various accents according to t heir genre; Keith Urban, who is Australian,

sings count ry music with a m arked American Southern accent . A recent study suggests that

the default singing accent for New Zealand pop singers utilizes American vowel sounds,

even when the singers aren’t trying to sound American, perhaps because today’s singerswere brought up listening to American (and imitation-American) pop vocals.

Even when singers aren’t t rying to im itate a particular vocal style associated

with a genre, regional dialects tend t o get lost in song: Int onation is

superseded by melody, vowel length by t he duration of each note, and vocal cadences by a

song’s rhythm. This makes vowel sounds and rhoticity all the more important in conveying

accent in song.

From left, Beatles John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney in April 1964Photo by AFP/GettyImages.

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