Could you distinguish English accent when one sings?

I forgot to add this about wee Geordie lad Joe from South Shields.....he is hell bent on completeting all his studies to gain all the professional qualifications he wants to achieve but I doubt whether he will be "allowed" to complete his mission. Hollywood may well ruin this lad in many ways - but he may well end up well minted in the process, so if that is all to the good for him and he'll be happy with that, then that would be great.

The greatest tragedy though would be for his speaking accent to end up just the same as his singing accent, but I doubt whether Joe would ever allow that to happen.....it hasn't been the case (much - perhaps just a wee bit) for Dame Julie Andrews, who, incidentally, is set to appear on the London West End stage again for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, with a much changed singing voice, naturally.

She is SO happy to be "back home again", or so she said on TV earlier today....Julie Andrews, the lass from Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.....unlike Joe, a Southerner.

Sorry, not exactly the West End stage - more the O2 Arena, close to Docklands in the East End of London - I could see it just across the River Thames from my office building in Canary Wharf, Docklands, an area completely and totally different in every way from what it was when Julie Andrews first sang on stage in bomb blasted London during WW2.

I hate when Britishers sing in RP, it sounds artificial (Soxie Elis Baxtor comes to mind). I prefer them in GA or a local British dialect.

Needless to say the female judge who had the misfortune to sit immediately to Simon Cowell's right is also a Geordie......maybe even from South Shields as well which would obviously have a very strong influence on the way she voted in respect of Joe's performance.

Of course, the whole X-Factor show is a wee bit of a farce and a sham anyway...about as shallow as a steamrollered frying pan all things considered.

There is a strong possibility that wee Geordie Joe from South Shields may well be playing the part of Buttons in the panto "Cinderella" in Newcastle or Sunderland twelve months from now in the extremely highly unlikely event of him turning down any multi zillion quid deal from America, and there is no guarantee he will pull it off with the American public anyway. Maybe that is equaly unlikely - you heard his singing accent - it made the lad seem as if he had never left Ohio in his entire life, and we all know how delightfully insular and self contained our American friends are in so many ways! ;-)

I find that is varies a lot from singer to singer. For example, Dido and the lead singers for Coldplay and Radiohead all sound very British when they sing, but there are others, like Amy Winehouse, who sound so American that I am surprised when I learn they are from the UK. The same thing can go for Americans - some singers just sound American, others adopt British sounds. Austalians seem to use either British (eg. Kylie Minogue) or American (eg. Savage Garden) accents when they sing; I can't think of a mainstream artist who sounds distinctly Australian.

It's not that hard to figure out the accent when singers actually use their own native accents, but lots of singers don't. In the '60's and '70's rock vocalists in general tended to sound somewhat Southern American or African-American when they sang, perhaps because those accents seemed appropriate for Blues-influenced music. Even today lots of singers from outside the South use a Southern-American-like monophthongized long-I, perhaps because it's easier to hit the note and keep the melody with a monophthong. Non-rhoticity is far more common in singing than speaking, perhaps also because it makes it easier to hit the notes and keep the melody.

Sometimes the accent seems to be part of the genre: American acts that are punk- or New Wave-influenced sometimes use English accents. Country singers from outside the South sometimes use Southern accents. Balladeers tend to back their vowels. Some folk-inspired singers affect truly outlandish faux-rustic or faux-archaic accents, like the Decemberists, Joanna Newsom, Dan Bejar of Destroyer and the New Pornographers, and Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown.

Some acts/singers for whom the accent is obvious: REO Speedwagon sound so Midwestern it hurts (or, as they would say, hrrrts). Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service has a distinctive Western-US cot-caught merger (It took several listens to "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" for me to figure out that he was saying "this gaudy apartment complex" and not "this scotty apartment complex.") I can't tell the accents of northern England apart, but I know Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys has one of them (Actually Mr. Turner has crystal-clear enunciation, but he says things like "fink" instead of "think".) Hank Williams, Jr. sounds like a trouble-making Redneck, which is in keeping with his musical persona. Miranda Lambert has the same rural, East Texas accent that I have, except she has some newer features, such as a fail/fell merger, that make her sound ignorant or childlike to my behind-the-times, middle-aged ears. Glasvegas, Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, and My Latest Novel, among others, have easily-discernible Scottish accents.

<<I can't think of a mainstream artist who sounds distinctly Australian.>>

Midnight Oil