Reply #86: Dunno exactly.

[immoderate]

But I've seen him in roles where he didn't lay it on so thick. He had a long career as a stage actor, probably could sound like anything he wanted.

Cribbed this from imdb.com:

As a young man, George Hayes worked in a circus and played semi-pro baseball. He appeared in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage, primarily in stock companies. Retired in his 40s, he lost much of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work. He had made his film debut prior to the crash, and continued working steadily until his second retirement in his late 60s. He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick Windy Halliday in many films between 1936-39. Leaving the Cassidy films, he was legally precluded from using the "Windy" nickname, and so took on the sobriquet "Gabby", and was so billed from about 1940. One of the few sidekicks to land on the annual list of Top Ten Western Boxoffice Stars, he did so repeatedly. In his early films he alternated between whiskered comic relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys, but by the later 1930s he worked almost exclusively as a Western sidekick to stars such as John Wayne Roy Rogers and Randolph Scott. After his last film, in 1950, he starred as the host of a network television show devoted to stories of the old West for children, "The Gabby Hayes Show" (1950). Offstage an elegant and well-appointed connoisseur and man-about-town, Hayes devoted the final years of his life to his investments.

--IMM