A conversation from last night reminded me of a song. “Who Am I” was penned by a British couple, Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch. The two were such a perfect couple and such a phenomenal songwriting team, they were known for a time as “Mr. & Mrs. Music.” The song was written in 1966, and recorded by Petula Clark, just before the two soul mates married. I’m not fond of the recording; the arrangement is obnoxious and the sound is over-produced in the way sixties music often was. Jackie’s lyrics, though, are magic.

The question of who I am crept into my mind because of something that I’ve mentioned here before. Somewhere, buried deep beneath years of conscious and unconscious suppression, I have an accent. That accent was a gift from my mother and father, both of whom grew up in small towns in Virginia. My hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia wasn’t quite so rural, but it wasn’t a big city, either. I spoke with that accent and was completely happy with it until I was around fourteen years of age.

When, as a teenager, I got my first job as a disc jockey at a small radio station, I began listening to the way other radio personalities talked. I listened to Larry Boggan on WBT in Charlotte, late at night, his clear voice and smooth diction cutting through hundreds of miles of static and fading. I listened to Charley Huddle, Dick Mountjoy, and even Alden Aaroe booming in from WRVA in Richmond. An accent like mine just didn’t fit in. Having studied the sounds of the most popular announcers of the day, I knew that a change was needed if I wanted to be successful in radio. I had to adapt.

I threw myself into the pursuit of improving my diction and standardizing my pronunciation. I practiced with tape recorders. I didn’t reserve the changes strictly for my hours on the air, either. To give myself the most practice possible, I incorporated the changes into my everyday conversation. I was at work on the problem, therefore, during nearly every waking hour. Over time, almost without realizing I was doing it, I invented a new Scott. His dialect was non-regional, his accent was largely neutral, and his vocabulary had become larger and more or less standard. Over the years, as both my career and my perspectives changed and developed, I continued to refine the way I presented myself verbally. Eventually, Scott was replaced by a sort of Scott-prime. He’s the man you hear now, the one you may think is the real me–but isn’t.

Southern accents don’t sound intelligent. I realize that I’m buying into a stereotype with that statement, and that it’s not true in every case, but for the most part, drawls don’t inspire confidence. If a surgeon described an upcoming operation to you in an accent reminiscent of Jeff Foxworthy, would you feel entirely comfortable? Even I wouldn’t, on a visceral level. Because of that, even after leaving the business of radio, I continued to be Scott-prime.

Other professionals have complimented me on my clean, intelligible speech patterns. I’ve been told that I sound very professional, and that I’m easy to listen to. I’ve been called expressive. All of these things would flatter me if they truly described me. Instead, they make me feel vaguely dishonest, because they describe a mere affectation that I’ve painstakingly created. It’s a façade that covers the accent that is, despite all attempts at denial, the real me. Because of my efforts to improve, I’m not really me anymore. That bothers me sometimes.

I haven’t used my voice as my livelihood for many years now. Where once my voice was my trademark as well as my stock in trade, it’s now just one of many tools of communication that I use in my daily life. I don’t strictly need to sound non-regional, polished, and smooth anymore. In the early years, maintaining this affectation was second nature, and almost as effortless as speaking normally. Now, the situation has been reversed. The decades have upgraded Scott-prime to my primary mode of speech, and downgraded the real Scott to mere second nature.

It occurs to me to wonder, as Jackie wonders in the song, just who I really am. Am I being honest with the world? With myself?

I’ve experimented in recent months with rediscovering my old accent, intentionally. It requires some effort, as would be expected, but when I’m speaking in that way, I also experience a certain sense of relaxation. Even though I don’t realize it or consciously feel it, it seems that there is still a small amount of mental energy that I expend to maintain Scott-prime. When I allow myself to fall into Scott mode, the absence of that small amount of stress is definitely felt. It’s like the small noises in our homes that we never notice until the power fails and we experience true silence. You don’t notice the sounds until they’re gone.

I find myself wondering what would happen if, as someone recently suggested, I simply returned to my roots, and reversed the transformation. Would people see me differently? Would people who’ve known me for years find it difficult to accept my accent, and find it less “real” than the way I speak now? How would my self-image change? Would the change complement the other changes I’m making in my life and my appearance, or detract from them?

I have more questions than answers at the moment, but the idea is well worthy of consideration.

I’ve spoken the way I do now for more years of my life than I spent speaking like a Virginian. It could be argued that the way I speak now is indeed more “real” than the pattern that fell by the wayside at age 14. With minimal effort, I could say goodbye to that Scott forever, vanquishing all vestiges of the drawling Virginia twang from my life. I could complete the transformation and never look back.

How would that feel?