@SW-User You find a similar range of tastes in Britain over its regional accents, which change remarkably over very shorts distances (often only tens of miles).
It's not so marked nowadays but a friend from an area called the Black Country, which is now a conglomeration of several towns joined by their suburbs, says at one time someone from, Dudley for example would not understand someone with a strong Walsall accent - these two towns are only a few miles apart!
Am American C&W singer exaggerating his or her own accent, or attempting one from a totally region, is one thing but can sound naff; but a non-American such as a Scot I used to know, trying it, can sound awful!
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My two sisters both saw Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music when they were young, and I had to put up with their renditions of the sugar-and-saccharine songs for months afterwards.
I saw the scene on TV, of Dick van Dyke's pretend-Cockney sweep and a troupe of boys cavorting around the wobbly plywood chimney, and I am afraid they did not endear me to the film. Some years ago I listened to a dramatization of the novel, on the radio. It is a strange story, rather dark and nothing like the film. No sweep in it either, but there is a polar bear or something!
The Sound of Music is not very popular in Austria. It is thought to be unfair about the real family's life. I think I read somewhere that the von Trapps emigrated to the USA and formed themselves into a professional singing troupe, but I have no idea how successful it was or how long that lasted.
it's not only Dick van Dyke who tries imitating a Cockney and sound dreadful. For a while an equally horrible version called "Mockney" was thought cool in Britain, among young people, DJs and the like. It might have been helped by the TV soap-opera Eastenders, which a lot of real London Eastenders don't like because though it does deal with problems found in real life, it concentrates them into unrelentingly depressing view of the area generally.
