If you have an arboretum nearby, I'd call them and ask their recommendations, they'd have been grown in similar climate and you'd get a true feeling for how well they do.

I don't know of any real good arboretums (ones that would have a decent magnolia selection) in that area (and I'm including southwest AL).

We're in a different world out here...but 'Elizabeth' and 'Yellow Fever' are two yellow flowered ones that we grow. Our issue is that we are a winter rainy climate and we do better with slightly later flowering varieties as they are less likely to have the flowers destroyed by late rains. That's why 'Yellow Fever' is a bit better as it flowers slightly later.

Here is a link that might be useful: Form and Foliage

'Elizabeth' seems to have a chronic pathogenic problem when in flower, also many of the yellow hybrids may be prone to dying back in the nursery environment, such as when overwintered in a humid poly tunnel. Again, liable to be pathogenic. I wonder if you are attributing the chronic browning of 'Elizabeth' to rain, but it is actually something else more or less peculiar to that cultivar - at least among the more familiar ones. If it's the rain that's browning that one out, I haven't made the connection. Other spring-blooming magnolias seem to be damaged by the opposite problem - bright sunshine during flowering - and of course the long well known issue with hard frost during flowering. But these are types that flower much earlier than 'Elizabeth'.

They're all getting the yellow from Magnolia acuminata subcordata, or in some cases yellow form (var. aurea) of otherwise typical M. acuminata). These yellow versions are characteristic of the southernmost parts of cucumber tree's natural distribution. If neither grows in original poster's area adequately then perhaps none of the hybrids will either. It depends on if the genes from one of the other parents managed to introduce greater tolerance in a particular instance.

We do have the cucumber magnolia as a native. I have never noted the flowers being particularly yellow. I'll scout the woods when they come into bloom.
Mike