I'm with Big Al on this.

If you sing as you speak, wouldn't that mean you're...speaking? Or maybe your culture doesn't distingusih speech from singing. Mine does.

There are a few big issues (i.e. in my opinion) that always mess with this discussion—a discussion taking place on an Anglophone "folk" music forum. One is:

The abhorrence of "fake" or "artificial" things, and the supposed opposite of being "true" to something, that seems to get wrapped up in MANY people's ideas of "folk" music. These are values that are part and parcel with a lot of people's involvement in Folk. This is the case even if it is just situating oneself as anti-commercial... which puts one in the Folk area by default.

(For example, there is a "Folk Music" store in my town. Why is it not just a MUSIC store? Well, it was clearly established in contrast to what people thought a plain ol' music store would mean. Fake pop music people and their ultimate phoniness of wanting money for their performance of music, their fake gimmicks used only for money rather than as a "natural" expression. Or maybe those fake classical musicians that represent high society always puttin' on airs with their canapés....I mean, who can get filled up on that?)

At the same time, the very idea of "folk" music was developed as something that was thought to represent the essence of some *group* of people. (These notions and values have been inscribed into the meaning of "folk," which is why I think it's disingenuous nonsense when someone tries to claim that "folk" is just a handy term for music that has been transmitted a certain way, etc.)

The notion of speech being representative of the essence of a group of people then comes in. The reasoning then becomes that one has an essential identity in the form of a group to which one belongs, made manifest through speech, ... and as per the valuing of "being true"— the Folk music people value— you gotta stick to that.

The ball may roll here and there, and sometimes someone will admit, "OK, in THAT case I guess you have to depart from your speech," but there is always some way of rationalizing things so it comes out to "being true." Again I think that is because one of the top values (or aesthetics) of a load of people involved in Folk music is the "being true" in some form.

Some people might be surprised, however, to find that a lot of people in the world - outside the Anglophone Folk scene - don't put a whole lotta emphasis on that value. And that's not the same thing as being "fake." I challenge you to define fake singing or a fake accent in a way that makes rational sense.