Steve,
Yes, we have those in the "Advent" thread, etc. -- but don't worry. You're assembling things under this topic, so go for it and keep going!

"Cynthia Sue" was copied, as you had asked, from the post about "New York Girls", with "Cynthia" (pronounced in 2 syllables) as my supposed origins of the familiar "Santy" in NYG. There's a link in the other post to a YT performance of "Cynthia Sue" where we can easily hear the NYG melody. Now, one can reason that NYG gave birth to "Cynthia Sue" or that the two songs derive from a common ancestor. But it seems to me that the inscrutable "Santy" in NYG derives from "Cynthia", rather than the other way around.

meself,

Good question and I don't know the answer, can only guess. I'd guess not *aiming for* middle/upper-class, since the minstrels were better described as "working class"—though whether *he* sounds upper-class is up to you. (To me he just sounds like an everyday [middle class?] American dude and yeah, I guess White.) I'd guess the singer wants to distance himself somewhat and is just reading the "dialect writing" in a kind of matter of fact way, rather than going to deep into what one might imagine as an exaggerated "imitation" of an 1840s Black American. I don't know how far Joel Sweeney went in caricature, but my rough impression is that he was someone generally interested in performing in the genre of "Black" music, attempting to imitate the sound but not caricature or derogate. The standard narrative is that Sweeney learned to play banjo from a Black neighbor. I'm of the opinion that the racism of minstrelsy, which can't help but come up, is something that evolved with audiences and with the years. Sweeney was like "Vanilla Ice" of his time. One might judge his actions as "racist" or based, unwittingly, in the "general racism" of his time, but his *intent* was not to perpetrate racism or create a presentation to be consumed as fuel for active racists. It was an interest in performing Black music -- or else a music that had emerged to a degree out of both White and Black communities but which society marked as "Black" -- and signaling an acknowledgement of that, through blackface, etc. was a necessary gesture to deflecting certain criticisms. "This isn't really me, it's a character I'm playing on stage" -- balancing society's judgement and what he wanted to do, in a negotiation.

I think of this as rather equivalent to myself wanting to perform Country ("Southern") music as a Northerner. I don't have a Southern accent, but if I sing Country I will take on some of the accent of the genre without trying to be totally silly and paint a picture of a Southern stereotype. So I think what you said, "the singer's natural accent with the lyrics as written" is accurate. Just an opinion, of course.