It got to the point I could understand all this perfectly.
We lived there only a year, while my husband was in grad school, so I didn’t really learn to understand the native speech. If it was absolutely essential, I’d keep asking until I got the message, but mostly I just lived with partial comprehension.
Around Tullahoma, with the Air Force station and the university branch and so on, most of the residents weren’t “from there,” even if they came from elsewhere in the South.