raymond,
Like you, as mentioned above, I have a whole family repertoire of songs on my mother's side to go at, and indeed I sing many of them. One of them is a lullaby I learned in the cradle and passed on to my own children. What is certain however is if I hadn't become interested in traditional song both as a performer and a researcher those songs would have become a dim and distant memory.

I prefer to think of 'traditional singer' as a relative term lacking hard and fast boundaries of meaning. If we were both being really picky we could claim to be traditional singers in a very small way, which is vastly overshadowed by the fact that all of the people here talking about this are very much revival performers.

Yes Fred was part of the 'tradition' and a revival singer, but Id pretty much guarantee which of the two nearly all of us here would use to describe him, so no contest. The fact that most of the people whose names are known to all of us as 'traditional singers' also performed in the revival and had songs from other sources, holds little relevance here.

Some of these analogies are pretty inane and irrelevant (IMHO). If you are going to use an analogy please make sure it's appropriate and at least similar in some way to what we are discussing.