"If you are trying to say that a traditional singer is one who sings only traditional songs, I don't think one exists."
I don't think one exists either, but it has been our experience with singers we have recorded that they do differentiate between the different types of song in their reperoire, even to the extent of having their own labels, particularly for the traditional ones - come-all-ye's, the old songs, Clare songs (from this county) etc.
Some singers used the terms 'folk' (Walter Pardon, for example) and 'traditional' was common with the older Irish singers and musicians around here.
Blind Travelling woman, Mary Delaney, with a repertoire of around 200 traditional songs, called them 'my daddy's' songs, even though she had learned less than a dozen from him - her way of distinguishing them from the others she knew. Mary could have doubled the songs she gave us with Country and Western songs alone, but she refused on the grounds that "they were not the ones she was looking for". She said she only sang them because "that's what the lads ask for down at the pub" and "The new songs have the old ones ruined".
Walter Pardon was not only discriminating between his different types of songs (as early as 1948, when he began writing them down in an exercise book), but he could, and did talk about what those differences were, often at great length.
While it is untrue to suggest that traditional singers only sang traditional songs, it is equally untrue that they didn't know the difference between one type and the other.
"until it degenerated into personal attacks etc..."
If my behaviour has in any way persuaded you not to join this forum, I can only apologise and hope you change your mind
Jim Carroll