Casting an eye over this old thread, it occurred to me that there is an interesting distincion between those who would criticise people for singing songs in their own accents and those who would criticise them for singig the same songs in an accent that isn't there own.

And the odd thing is that there are people who would who believe both things at the same time, which implies that songs should never spread more than a few miles from wherever they were first sung.

My feeling is that we should feel free to sing songs from anywhere, using our own natural language.