Where Can I Find Old Sounds Of Southerners Talking?

The following is a list of famous Virginians. If you view their films and/or listen to their sound recordings, you will notice different dialects, each representative of a particular locale and the level of the speakers education.
Primitive recordings of the late 1800′s/early 1900′s should not be used to assess any accent.
Shirley McLaine, actress, and her brother Warren Beatty, actor
Roy Clark, Country singer
Joseph Cotton, actor, his voice and accent was as smooth as silk, very refined.
Randolph Scott, actor/producer, his voice was calming, yet rich and romantic.
Ella Fitzgerald, singer,actress
Pearl Bailey, singer, actress, US Ambassador
Arthur Ashe, tennis pro
Sam Snead, golfer
The Statler Brothers (Don, Harold, Phil, Jimmy), Country singers.
Search all you want, but you will soon discover there is not “one” Southern accent, but many.
Each “drawl”, is as different as it’s place of origin and the people of that area.
My parents, their siblings, my great-aunts & uncles and my grandparents were born in Georgia.
I was born in Florida but have the very heavy Wiregrass Georgia accent of my older family members, which could fool even the most insightful linguist.
Good luck with your project.
Interesting question.
P.S.
Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, so it is highly possible a recording was made of a Civil War Veteran’s voice.

I speak all three English dialects of Tennessee, all of the Georgia dialects, North Carolina, and Virginia except for coastal. You can include Mississippi and Alabama in that also.
There is NO one southern accent and what you heard was an actor – there were no old recording devices back then. My normal language is East Tennessean which is substantially different from W. Tennessean, Middle Tennessean, and Mississippian
I also have the ability to nail the place where a man came from in the south to within about 50 miles from where he was raised by pronunciations of certain words.
The three sylable YES and the drawl from Gone with the Wind and other Hollywood phenomena are purely false, those things don’t exist.
There is some help for you, however. If you are interested in Appalachian language spoken in the Smokies, you can get a kids book by Ray Hicks on Jack Tales. There is an accompanying CD that has my old friend Ray, now deceased, telling his stories in his own language. You might can find some audio sources from recordings that were made when they got the people of out where the Smokies are and a man named Joseph S. Hall recorded people telling stories,etc.
You might can find a Master’s Thesis or a Doctoral Dissertation by a William Foster who went from court house to court house and compiled a dictionary of country usages in the South. There, you will learn that after you have put the horseshoes on the horse, he is shod, not shoed.

Here’s a link you should like. It’s all about American dialects including some audio but I do agree with the previous answer. I live in Virginia but I speak with a Tennessee accent different from the people here.

there is some videos out with Confederate veterans speaking with union veterans at the 75thy Gettysburg reunion. I don’t know if any Audio of this is at the end of the ken burns civil was series. Google civil war documentries

check library of congress. NPR website may have links. Or just come to my home county. It’s a foreign language. Good luck