Feral folk - hmm - sounds like a trip to the zoo by the Blue Peter team.
I have always seen the need for fine tuning the existing definition, but unless and until the singing traditions rise up from the grave and begin to incorporate the navel-gazing mumblers into the repertoire, I really can't see the point in re-definition, especially as the term is doing so well outside the folk-club greenhouses.
Let's face it, this thread started as an attempted challenge of the 1954 definition, and when that fell (at the first fence, as far as I'm concerned), it came down to "Ah well, definitions don't matter anyway."
Not long after I stumbled on this forum (don't think I was a member then) I got involved in a long, convoluted discussion with some burke whose argument ran something like this:
"If I wrote a song and passed it on to my mate, who then passed it on to his mate, then doesn't that make it traditional". His (I think it was a he; women tend to have much more down-to-earth logic about them) conclusion - that I should go off and find a designation other than 'traditional' for what I was doing.
Language doesn't work like that.
All that was, and this has been, is an Orwellian exercise by a small group within a small group, to manipulate our language for their own convenience - Newspeak - so to speak. Otherwise, I'm sure they would have been able to answer some of the fundamental contraditions in their argument. As it was, they didn't even address them.
Jim Carroll