The Apostle

This afternoon when I ought to have been studying, I watched a Robert Duvall movie called The Apostle, which is about an evangelical preacher in the American Deep South. It's a very good movie, but the thing I found most fascinating was the language.
They had a whole bunch of Holiness Temple preachers in full bore (real ones, that is), and it sounded like a tidal wave, they had all these lovely long dipthongised vowels, and were emphasising stressed words a lot, and used extra unstressed words to manipulate where the key words would be to get the best verbal emphasis. There were also a lot of terminal -e sounds being tacked on to words, as if they needed an extra syllable to get their mouths around the next cascade of words: self-e, don-e, Jesus-uh. The whole thing made me wonder if the preachers were anything like an Old English bard in full flight. Absolutely fascinating.