Andy Griffith coached his cast to speak with a North Carolina accent

Andy Griffith mostly got what he wanted in creating The Andy Griffith Show. He was fond of the producers, Sheldon Leonard and Aaron Ruben, who were willing to bend to Griffith’s will in casting and writing the series. Griffith got his wish to have Don Knotts join the cast. The two had worked together before, and Knotts was hand-selected for the role of Barney Fife.

Obviously, Griffith had control over where his show was set, as well. Although Mayberry was fictional, it was rooted in the real world. The made-up suburb was based on Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina, as he sought to bring the south to the rest of the country. It was his goal to present a more realistic, less-hokey version of a region that was usually depicted as populated by hillbillies.

One of the ways Griffith wanted to present the South was with more realistic accents than those typically heard on TV. The catch, though, was that his cast was from all over, and most of them didn’t naturally sound like they were from Mayberry
So, in preparing for the show’s first episode, Griffith was tasked with coaching the other actors to acquire an accent to match his own. In a 1960 interview with Columbia, South Carolina’s The State, Griffith detailed the process of creating a believable Mayberry dialect. Some of the cast, it seemed, were quicker to pick up on the drawl than others.

“It wasn’t hard for Don to catch on. he’s been hearing me talk for a long while. And being from West Virginia as he is—well, he’s a regular Southern boy.

Little Ronny [Howard], well… He was born in Oklahoma but his folks moved him away when he was just six weeks old. So I sorta give him speech tips when we’ve time and he’s catching on just fine.”

The ladies in Mayberry, it seemed, required even less tutelage.

“Southern talk came easy to Frances,” said Griffith. “And Elinor Donahue—well, I’ll help her out if she needs it when she joins the cast too.”