In some cases, it would be difficult to deliver a lyric *without* using some approximation of the song's original accent/dialect.

As an analogy, consider acting in an Irish play as corollary to singing an Irish song. I performed in a couple of John Millington Synge one-act plays as a college student, and believe me, you cannot recite those lines *without* your voice falling into some kind of "brogue" or "lilt"; some element of native west-of-Ireland speech seems to be built right into the syntax, phrasing, etc. of Synge's work. The trick, I suppose, is to find a way not to overact to the point where you become a cariacture of yourself.

When I was in those plays, I was an Irish-American kid who had never been to Ireland, and who was not even aware that there are *different* Irish accents in different areas of Ireland. I got the roles because my voice sounded appropriate to the equally-ignorant director and audience. I'm sure that standards for such an accent would be *much* higher in the UK (and of course in Ireland itself), where the general public is more aware of the real accents of their actual neighbors.

I'm sure that part of my accent came from my mother's "stage Oirish" -- she did lots of amateur theater back before I was born -- but I'd like to think that I also incorporated a degree of more authentic influence from having lived next-door to a family of recent Irish immigrants, whose parents were native Irish speakers from County Galway who spoke English with notably "thick" or heavy accents. So perhaps my put-on speech patterns were not too terribly wrong for Synge's Aran Islands settings, after all.