My pal Ken Levine writes a nice piece about Andy Griffith but gets one thing wrong. He says they mimicked Griffith's voice for Huckleberry Hound. Not so. That was a voice Daws Butler had been doing in cartoons for years before it was assigned to the mouth of Huck Hound. It was a voice animation directors (especially Tex Avery) loved and they often hired Daws, who could do a zillion voices, just for that one. This was years before Mr. Griffith had burst onto the national scene and anyone knew who he was.
The voice itself was basically Daws's own with a North Carolina drawl that he said he picked up from a neighbor of his wife Myrtis back when they began dating. At Hanna-Barbera, they did base voices on celebrities — Doggie Daddy sounding like Jimmy Durante, for instance. But this was not a case of that.