Pip Radish: "a vast ocean of music, with enough songs to keep any singer going for a lifetime. The realisation that I'd been missing out on all that music"

Again very seriously not being arsey here. But yes, me too. Except I feel that partly (if not greatly) to blame for my lack of exposure to Traditional Song is that it was/has been utterly lost and overwhelmed by a surfeit of eclectic material which has - like it or no - mushroomed beneath the fungal folk umbrella.

Not sure I buy the OP's thesis myself; preferring 'Folk as Genre' (which tends to be the way most people organise music) though frankly on logic and empirical evidence, SS's reasoning seems hard to fault!

So, I'd like to see 'Traditional [Folk] Song' out from underneath the suffocating umbrella of Folk, where it is utterly LOST! And indeed will ever remain so - irrespective of whatever a tiny few would prefer to be the case.

Prioritise! The songs matter more than some verbage!

Of course while the annoyed scratch their itching sores, and grumble, thankfully there are real YET real live boys n' girls like Mawkin Causley, and Bellowhead, going out there and doing the REAL work of communicating folk songs to those who might still actually give a damn... ;-)