I’m going to to a reading of one of my own poems that I wrote. It lends itself to the speech well with some of the similes that are used. Though I think that it might have come across more southern in my recording than Western but I’ve always felt like those two are really close in dialects.  Here is the poem that I wrote.

Shot

By: Kim Sealock

I can tell you it didn’t hurt

as much as I thought it would.

 

What hurt was when the doc

plunged his forceps deep into my shoulder.

The laudanum didn’t

dull the pain.

I could feel the cold forceps

fumbling and shaking deep

inside my fevered body;

never quite grasping the bullet.

Until finally with luck

the doc gripped the bullet

and tugged it up, with the same force

as an eager child tugs on the rope,

when trying to win a game of Tug-of War.

 

I screamed as the iron slug

tore its way out

the same way it had entered.

I wasn’t the only one screaming

there in that tent.

Billy Joe Williamson

is screaming as a needle binds his skin together.

Bobby Johnson

is screaming as the saw makes its way through his bone,

with the sound of nails on a chalkboard.

Patrick Smith

is screaming because he sees the light

and can’t remember how many Hail Mary’s he was supposed to say.

There were many others screaming

from our regiment.

 

My screaming stopped briefly

once the slug had been freed

from the muscled home

it had made itself.

The doc set my skin on fire

with whiskey in my open wound,

it hurt like a thousand tiny devils

trying to rip every nerve in two.

 

The doc bandaged me up

I shrugged on my grey jacket

grabbed my musket

and wobbled out of the tent.

The doc yelled at me to take it easy.

I buttoned my Virginia buttons

and told him colonels never quit.

 

 

The only reason I did this assignment was because I still needed half a star for my western created character to meet the quota needed. I chose to do this assignment because it was related to the western theme and seemed like it wouldn’t be too time-consuming to complete. The assignment was to read song lyrics, a poem, or monologue using a western slang accent. So as soon as I read the description I decided that I wanted to read another Langston Hughes’ poem “Life is Fine” to demonstrate how my created character thinks of the world of just being alright.

The next thing I did was go in my room to avoid distractions and just read the poem using the most western accent I could think of while I was recording with my iPhone. As I was reading the poem, I noticed that I really didn’t have that many chances to change the words to be slang words; since in a lot of instances it was already written in slang. After listening to the first take on my phone, I thought that the recording was the best version that I was going to get. So I sent it to my email and converted it to an MP3, and posted it to SoundCloud.

Here is my western slang reading of Langston Hughes’ poem “Life is Fine”.

I decided to read the lyrics from “Hotline Bling” by Drake.

This is a westernized reading of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe in accordance with this assignment, which asks us to read something with this accent. Hopefully I don’t sound too southern in the mix. Sometimes I get carried away.

Putting this together was an adventure. I had to reread this a lot of times and cut it down significantly while editing so it wouldn’t run for more than a couple minutes. I only took three stanzas of the whole poem to read aloud. After I finally got a good reading into Audacity, I downloaded some sounds from Freesound and mixed it in to give more of an ambiance behind the reading.

Overall I think it worked out nicely. I love this poem, and I wouldn’t have associated it with western themes of any kind, so changing it up like this was a cool way to alter a classic.

One of the assignments we were required to complete this week was the Rooty Tooty Speech of the West. I decided to pick a chorus of a very popular song, See you again by Wiz Khalifa, and change it up with some western lingo. I used the suggested website that was attached to translate some of the words. I had a hard time going through and find words that would fit in with these lyrics and some of them just didn’t sound like it fit. Listening back this definitely sounds weird but I guess this is what it would sound like to rap back in the western days! This was a pretty fun assignment and I liked that I chose lyrics that everyone knows.

This assignment I decided Sally should talk about her saloon a little bit since not many know of this fine establishment! Sally has a great place just her rough housing brothers may put a damper on things! This assignment wasn’t hard, the hardest part was coming up with what to say. Other than that I used a western lingo generator and audacity to complete this task.