"It's impossible to imagine singing 'the wee lass on the the brae' without a hint of Scots inflection. Substituting the words for standard English would just be surreal. That way lies madness"

And have you ever heard "you are nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. You have never caught a rabbit and you are no friend of mine"?

Seriously,I sing a lot of Australian songs which I have picked up travelling in Australia. I don't sing in any accent but my own, but sometimes a word or two seems to just come out "that way", I assume from learning the song from a cd rather than a book. On the other hand, I don't know any way to sing some Scottish or Irish songs without some accent as the dialect is built in, I'm thinking of McPherson's Lament.

Closer to (my) home, I don't have any hesitation to sing a southern Appalachian song in regional accent; that just is part of the song. I have travelled to a couple of family reunions (my wife's family) in Tennessee, and I have noted that I pick up spoken accents, or at least that one, very readily, and that is kind of embarrasing and feels like I might be seen as parodying the local accent.