Guest: It's not so much where I'm from as it is where my friends are from. I am a member of a 1500 member black Baptist Church, and with a few exceptions, almost everyone grew up in the South. I know for myself that you can lose a certain amount of local accent when you live in another part of the country most of your life. But, I don't know any blacks who sound like the old dialects. Sho nuff. Not saying that there aren't any. Anyway, I think that you've got it right... as long as you're straightforward and honest about it, very few people would find that offensive. To me, that's far less offensive than exagerating the dialect (Geoff the Duck) to the point where it seems like a characature. I've heard some whites do black music with such an exagerated dialect that it has almost spoiled the original recordings for me. Then, there are folks like Jack Elliot who grew up in Brooklyn and became an Okie. I love his singing because he has made the songs his own. Maybe that's the secret. If it ain't honest, it ain't folk music.