An Autobiographical Note Relating to the FX Series "Justified"

Last week my sister came down with a nasty cold, so over the weekend she relaxed a bit and watched the entire first season of "Justified" on DVD. I watched the first episode with her and liked it okay, but decided I would get on with some things I was working on instead of spending all day in front of the TV with a sick person. I'd assumed the series would be more dark than comedy, but every time I walked through the room, there seemed to be something fun and quirky happening, or some odd character would be dishing out a smart one-liner. (I sat and watched the last episode with her too, and it was kind of awesome.)

The show is set in rural eastern Kentucky. I'm not sure how careful the producers were in getting all the actors on the same page accent-wise--like I said, I only saw two episodes in their entirety--but they seemed to do a pretty good job. It turned out that having the DVD running all day got that accent stuck in my head, and I found that it felt weirdly familiar, like I'd had it tucked away inside my head already. I've lived in Texas all my life, so I thought to myself, "A Texas accent is different from a Kentucky accent, and anyway, I don't have much of a Texas accent either." Then I remembered that my mother's father grew up on a farm in southern Indiana, not fifty miles from Louisville, Kentucky. (I never saw the farm--it was sold in 1929, and my grandfather grew up to be a dentist and later a college professor, and raised my mom in Indianapolis. I've passed through Kentucky about a dozen times over the years for visits--go see Mammoth Cave if you're ever there.) I got out a map to see where Harlan, the small town where "Justified" is set, might be, and discovered that, being in far southeastern Kentucky, it's a lot further from the old farm than Louisville is, but also just over the mountains from where my father's mother grew up, in western North Carolina.

A poster advertising the sale of livestock and farming implements from the estate of my mother's father's father, who was killed by a bad bologna sandwich when my grandfather was five.

My father's mother has what I consider to be a "fancy" southern accent, and I'd never thought of it as having any similarities to my mother's father's farm-boy way of speaking. My mother's father died nearly ten years ago, and I can just barely remember his voice. He was a thin man--he smoked all his life, and it killed him--with a slow, rumbly baritone, and was prone to folksy turns-of-phrase, like, "Now do you mean funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?" I hear him echoed in my mother's voice and sayings, too (she loves to quote him), although I've always thought of my mother as being from the one part of the country where Americans have "no accent." (I wonder how many people in the world think of their mother as having "no accent"!) The only person who has ever commented on my accent was the father of a high school friend, who asked if one of my parents grew up in Virginia. I confirmed that my father had, and asked how he could tell. He said, "You have a Virginia "O"." (If I could go back in time, I'd pick that man's brain for everything he knew.)

So somehow, somewhere, amid the swirl of accents I get from my family, not to mention movies and TV, there is something like a Kentucky accent. For curiosity's sake, I've broken down how close each of my grandparents' hometowns are to Harlan, Kentucky (with thanks to Google maps, which, in the show at least, hasn't gotten around to mapping some places yet, "like North Korea... and Raylan's hometown"):

Mother's mother's hometown (NJ): 665 miles NE of Harlan

Father's father's hometown (VA): 284 miles E of Harlan

Mother's father's hometown (IN): 259 miles NW of Harlan

Father's mother's hometown (NC): 179 miles SSE of Harlan (over the mountains)

My hometown (TX): 953 miles WSW of Harlan