Americanisation versus Cockney Stylisation in Amy Winehouse’s Singing Accent

The paper addresses the problem of style-shifting in British pop singing, with Amy Winehouse’s spoken vs. singing accent in focus. As observed by Trudgill (1983), the use of six stereotypically American pronunciation features had been popular among British vocalists since the 1950s. Americanisation phenomenon became less noticeable with the arrival of new wave and punk rock in the 1970s. The two main tendencies in the singing accent, i.e. Americanisation on the one hand, and the use of some working class features on the other, mingled and coexisted to create a conflict of identities. Since that time, changing trends in popular music singing styles have been observed (Simpson 1999, Beal 2009, Gibson and Bell 2012). With Trudgill’s observations and predictions as departure points, this article’s aim is to analyse selected features of contemporary pop singing on the basis of Amy Winehouse’s accent. The focus is on potential Americanisation, as jazz and soul singing styles seem to be prone to the phenomenon due to the American roots of these musical genres, and the influence of the working class accent, as the singer was born in London. Amy Winehouse’s spoken accent is used for comparison (on the basis of selected interviews). The quantitative analysis is based on two studio albums released by the vocalist: Frank (2003) and Back to Black (2006). Three phonetic features have been chosen for the analysis, all of which can be indexed as “American”: yod dropping, coda-r and the lack of TRAP-BATH split. Additionally, the overview of selected Cockney features is presented. PRAAT is used for the acoustic analysis of selected instances of the BATH and TRAP vowels (on the basis of isolated vocal tracks and the interviews); while consonants are coded auditorily. The results show relatively strong influence of American English: 100% of Americanisation with regard to the lack of TRAP-BATH split on both albums; rise in rhoticity from 30% on the first to 43% on the second album, as well as the respective rise in yod-dropping from 73% to 100%. The results on both albums seem to correlate with changing musical styles and the growing popularity of the singer, as well as some multimodal stylisation aspects.