It is a more gentle sound with some English overtones. One can hear it more in the elderly ladies who reminisce about their “mathers when they wah small guls.”
Well, I guess to a northerner, we all look, sound and act alike.
My maternal grandmother was very proud of her Virginia roots, she was Tidewater VA and Charleston SC. The Tidewater accent is the one with the soft "o"s and elided "r"s and the transformation of "house" to "hoose" - almost Scots in sound.
C'ville is so far west that it's really in the Appalachian foothills. Minus all the riff raff from all over who show up because of the university, it's more conventionally "mountainy" in sound - more twang and Elizabethan vowels.
Still not the generalized Piedmont accent that you hear on TV.
Anybody from the South can spot a fraud. Even people in the individual states have slightly different variations of the Southern accent. To me, TN and Texas sound a lot a like. Alabama and Georgia have their own accent.
Every southern state has a little different accent imo. People from NC don’t sound like those from SC or Alabama ect . There is a group of people in eastern NC who actually sound a lot like New England. They ve always been in NC.
It is called a “Tidewater” accent. I live in Tidewater and one rarely hears it anymore, even here.