I have a fondness for Black tunes and have also ventured into some Scottish stuff now and again. With regard to the latter, the operative phrase is "put it across." If I do the John McLain (sp? too lazy to look) March as I heard it, the average American audience will find it "well nigh" (or damn near) incomprehensible, and might just think it a weird song, an effect I do not wish to create. On the other hand, in a classroom or some venue which is as much of a learning experience as a performance, doing Patrick Spens or True Thomas "authentick" can be a hoot. Like when my lit teacher read Chaucer as he pronounced it, to demonstrate the evolution of the English language.

Slightly off subject, but there are precedents above, I sing more nasally on some banjo & dulcimer tunes than on non-mountainy stuff. That too is in the name of faithfulness to the genre.

W/the Black and pseudo-Black (e.g. Kingdom Comin') material, the obvious caution of not reverting to blackface minstrelsy obviously applies. (I know, "Here we go again...") In my personal opinion, which is only that, Kingdom Comin' done heavily ebonically can't help but cause some folks unease; done in my natural sloppy Calif. Caucasian accent, it becomes an insightful, historically interesting song. With blues though, they didn't say "Going down the road feeling bad," they said "Gwine down 'a road feelin' bad," and changing that sort of sterilizes the whole thing to the point where I don't have the catharsis Aristotle promised me personally that I should get from singing funky tunes.

CC