Because of the New Orleans dialect/influence.
The Yat dialect influence is with him a good deal I think.
It is more like a port city dialect than what one thinks of as Lowland Southern or what you hear in Gone with Wind. So yeah like Brooklyn-esque or Baltimore.. drop r's... fire=fya.car=ca. But yet it is unique, unique words/sounds, and has Southern influences and varies widely person to person and depending what area of the city they grew up/lived in. It is really it's own linguistic enclave, much like Charleston, in the South.


And they prounounce things/words a lot differently than most places.

It's basically the same as Buckwheat Zydeco's, if you listen to his song Turning Point, he says it like, "I've reached the toining point."