amen...being a cotton state raised lad from Dixie now living in middle Tennessee and who works with folks from up the Cumberland plateau and so forth daily....I already knew this.
hillbilly and southern drawls as very different
true southern drawl runs from east Texas up to Dallas and across Louisiana and southern Arkansas into only west-middle Tennessee and western Kentucky and then all of Mississippi and Alabama south of Huntsville into southern Gerorgia and parts of Atlanta even and most of South Carolina , middle and eastern North Carolina, to tidewater Virginia and a hint even into Maryland coastal...and a spine down through Florida panhandle over to Jacksonville and meanders down through Florida in places all the way to Clewiston to Everglades City
Appalachin accents though varied between say Blue Ridge Georgia to Wheeling West Virginia run primarily in all the hill/mountain country from the southeast up deep into the North
Anyone who spends a lot of time cruising around the South eventually comes to realize that there are scores and scores of sub-dialects — maybe hundreds. Or at least, “were.” People in Tidewater Virginia had the general Southern drawl dialect — but not as slow a drawl as those from Charleston, SC, say. Then inside Tidewater there are (or at least were) different usages in Norfolk and in Portsmouth, on opposite sides of the Elizabeth River. Then there were Eastern Shore dialects, as someone pointed out above. In Appalachia, the cadence tends to be more clipped and faster as you move up country from Tennessee to Pennsylvania — but there are exceptions along the way.
And its not just Southern. I inherited a good “ear” from both parents, for which I am grateful. When mingling with New Yorkers, I can usually pick out a native of the Bronx, which imbues a different accent than Brooklyn. In New England, you hear different dialects in Vermont, and New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, of course (Bah-stonian, wheah they pahk tha cahs, for example). And Maine is great — Down East is my favorite, but then there’s upcountry Aroostook, where you run into the northern edge of redneck USA, mingling with speakers of Canadian French. And in the Western Maine mountains, a whole new vocabulary and inflection. Wonderful place for a language maven.