Well that didn't work. Third time lucky? (the computer ate my first and second posts)
Nobody can be completely authentic, no matter how hard they try. When I owned a house built in about 1720 and we were working on rstoring it people would ask "are you going to do an authentic restoration?" I would reply "well, we would like to have indoor plumbing and electricity, neither of which was available in 1720." and go on from there.
Similarly, I use a 1931 Martin 0-18 with steel strings and a 1915 mongrel banjo (Sears Roebuck Supertone) also w steel strings for most re-enactment work and yes, I KNOW it's not authentic, but we change keys a lot and it means you don't have to wait 5' for us to get the gut strings in tune. Then we try to sing songs we know were written before 1865 and there's a lot of them. And try to play songs more-or-less in minstrel "stroke" style on bj and "parlor" style guitar-- thumb and fingers. I think we sound a lot like the old days but since Edison didn't get around to inventing the phonograph till around 1880, we don't know what it sounded like in 1861-65. I do think that Dixie played pretty much as the Skillet Lickers played it comes a lot closer to Dan Emmett's spirit than most of the "modern" versions.
and if pressed I quote Walt Whitman. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."