Your post reminded me of comments by Edward L Ayers (University of Virginia, Valley of the Shadow).
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/FFP0404S.pdf

Growing up during the 1960s in Kingsport TN, Ayers remembers having a sense of being different.

We all knew that despite our surfer shorts, Maltese cross necklaces and whatever fad came and went, we were hillbillies in the eyes of the world. The Beverly Hillbillies were the stars of television then, and we recognized that the show made fun of us. They talked in caricatures of our accents; we knew people who said "see-ment," just the way Granny did when she talked about the "cement pond", the swimming pool. We saw that people made jokes about us -- right on television -- just the way we made jokes about black people. Friends came back from vacations up North or in Florida and reported that people outside the mountains wondered if we wore shoes and had indoor plumbing.

Later, as a graduate student at Yale, he and his wife Abby drew immediate attention as Southerners.

People continually commented on our accents, and some professed not to be able to understand us. Abby ordered a lemonade our first day in New Haven, and the man behind the counter, puzzled, said, "Ham and eggs?" When an Israeli couple across the hall had us over for dinner along with a couple from Ohio, the Ohio folks asked the Isrealis if they could hear any difference in our accents. In all friendliness, the Israelis acknowledged that they could indeed because "we watch Hee Haw all the time."

Home from New Haven one summer, Ayers recalls visiting his grandparents in the mountains of North Carolina. His grandfather was working on a summer resort for a family from Florida.

[They] drove up the dirt road in a huge RV, and as soon as they got out, I could see they had come on an anthropological mission. The father had told the wife and children about this colorful old mountain man who was building their vacation house for them. The kids, teenagers, made no effort to hide their amusement at everything they saw around them: the unpainted and rusty tin roof, the old pictures on the walls, the accents and vocabulary of my grandparents. The visitors patronized their elderly hosts shamelessly. Sitting in the living room, they ignored me for a while, but the mother eventually turned to me and asked me where I lived. "New Haven, Connecticut," I answered, in a modulated version of the same accent as my grandparents. Surprised, and with other family members suddenly listening, she asked what I was doing there.

Ayers replied that he was studying at Yale, which spoiled the anthropological expedition.

Taken from What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History, chapter 1, "Pieces of a Southern Autobiography."