One of the defining aspects of traditional music, for me, is that it is local music. Doing local music from elsewhere doesn't really feel like folk singing to me. I tend to sing songs using the accent and dialect that folks around here use, no matter where the song is from. Sometimes that means changing the lyrics from whatever dialect I found them in to make them work in American English.

Carefully recreating a performance from the past and/or from somewhere else feels to me more like ethnomusicological research than folk singing.

John Peekstok