Padre,

I am talkning about both actually. I am a true American, I speak our fundamentally flawed English nothing else altho I speak Canadian when I must. I would never sing a song in French to any of my audiences. I wouldn't know what I was singing and my audienec wouldn't know what I was singing either. I find that to be a bit pretentious.

And unless I am burlesqueing a song outright, I won't sing in a dialect or an accent either. But some songs will nearly require an accent if the dialectic words are sung " Twas a braw bricht moonlicht nicht" rather than It was a fine bright moon lit night.

My question is where do we draw the line on translations into a modern English for some of the older songs? Just because Child has a dialect down for a song is it wrong to sing it in a modern form of the original language?

Don