There seems an unfortunate tendency to equate 1) singing songs from outside your personal tradition with 2) trying to be who you are not. The two have very little in common, IMO, except possibly in the work of a few unfortunates who can only imitate, being unable to develop a personal style.

I think you're wrong in assuming that performance style equals a wannabe crawling inside another race's or ethnicity's skin. As if it were impersonation. At worst, a sort of stagey parody that's a pathetic and insulting travesty, as with, say, blackface minstrelsy.

All that has nothing to do with how I approach Irish songs, which are very close to my heart as an Irish-Anglo-Welsh American.   I'm just multitraditional, that's all, with no particular claim to "authenticity" in any, but a vivid feeling for several that translates itself into music I love to make.

(By the way, you should hear England's David Jones pick and sing "Willie Moore" on the banjo Appalachian style. Very satisfying to me as a sharp critic of shallow imitators; he "gets" the style and works creatively in it. He might change your mind about the validity of cross-cultural music.)

But to go to the heart of the question, where the shoe really pinches, take blues. When I play blues I try to do justice to the style of the song as I heard and learned it. I think it would be insulting to take the song bodily out of the style it swims in! Dave Van Ronk was just one of many who argued strongly for sound and style being integral to a song, so that the song is neutered without it.

So though I don't necessarily "sing like," say, Blind Lemon Jefferson, I try to put into "Broke and Hungry" or "Match Box Blues" all the many things I've learned from his voice and style, in a way that I hope respects him, his tradition, and also myself.

I think about this a lot. In one respect, I take the view that he's no longer around to sing these blues himself; nobody else, or few others at most, sing his stuff. If his music was widespread and being done well by many others, I probably would choose something a little less commodified. As it is, I'm glad to be putting a rare sound back into the world in a form not dependent on a CD machine, amplifier and speakers.

Jefferson is a good example because a lot of Southern white pickers learned his stuff. He truly fostered a musical crossover. Papa Charlie Jackson was another who was very influential among whites. I could cite many. On the other hand Charley Patton was relatively hard to learn from. But "Stone Pony" is a song I couldn't do without.

I claim no particular virtue in my interpretation of their songs, and have sometimes been criticized for doing them at all. All I can say is, I love those songs as much as any in my "own" tradition, and they're part of my life.   I don't think anyone can or should ask more than that of a singer who's singing outside his personal tradition, whatever it may be.

Bob