Alfred E. Finn - What, me riverboat?
Huckleberry Finn was Twain's big attempt at writing in dialect, and for all the excellence of the novel, it shows. In the opening chapters, Huck's country twang is as thick as molasses - by the end, it's settled down into a mellower, lilting drawl. Jim starts out sounding like a bad caricature of a Vaudevillian blackface actor doing a bad caricature of a black slave, but sort of comes around to some degree of intelligibility by the end.
Speaking as an editor now, I can tell you that it's a pain in the ass to go back and fix things. If you get a good idea for a change on page 185 and you think it should be retroactively implemented all the way back from page 1, you'll groan and grimace and, to be honest, probably not do it, or do it half way. This means that you, and by you I mean we, are too lazy to hit ctrl+F, go back to page 1, and type new words over old words. Have another bacon sandwich, butter fatty.
To write an homage to Whitman, mash the keyboard with your hand now...
Back in Twain's day, that sort of revision would have actually required one to write things out longhand, then adjust the movable type machine, then probably get polio and die. This is why it's excusable for Huck and Jim's dialects to shift a little bit over the course of the book, and it's also why you, young modern writer, should know a thing or two about writing in dialect.
There are three keys to applying dialect to your dialogue: consistency, accuracy, and purpose.
Consistency.
If you're going to drop g's, drop every g. Don't have someone go around "Fuckin' banging everything in sight like a dog in heat." They are fuckin' bangin', or fucking banging - not both. If your character's first person subjective pronoun is pronounced "Ah," she should never refer to herself as "I."
Accuracy.
If I were so inclined to write from the perspective of a 19th century antebellum southern aristocrat, I would not make him sound like one of his slaves, nor would he sound like a Yankee gentleman of similar means and station. Unfortunately, we don't have audio recordings from the 19th century, and so we have to guess. We have some historical records, we can treat modern southern dialects like descendants of a "southern prime" and make some inductions, but mostly it's an educated guess, and my character is pretty much going to sound like Foghorn Leghorn.
Purpose.
Why do you want to put your dialogue in dialect? Unless there's something essential in the tone and timbre of the dialect, just leave it out. The odds are fair-to-good that dialect will be misconstrued as an attempt to ridicule the speaking character (something Twain himself has been accused of more than once), and that's only so long as the reader actually gets the sound of it right. In my 9th grade English class we read "A Raisin in the Sun," together aloud, and I was "treated" to an interpretation of Mama Younger that sounded a lot more like Jamie Presley than Claudia McNeil. No, it wasn't intentional - it was a bad reading.
Not your father's poor black matriarch.
Dialect can add a lot of flavor to a story, but it can also be a seductive trap. In your quest for authenticity you run the risk of perpetuating parody. In your quest for consistency, you risk alienating a reader (not to mention breaking your spellchecker) by writing line after line of grammatically rough prose.
But if you can be consistent and accurate and aware of your purpose at all times, the payoff is there. Remember to treat your subject with respect - don't write in dialect because you want to make fun of the way the character talks - reflect it, and decide if what they're saying is more important than how they're saying it. If it's not, there's a good chance that you're dipping into mockery. If it is, then let the meaning of the expression show through the sound of the words.
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