"I think the more discerning members have agreed that there is no absolutely cast iron definition with hard and fast boundaries."
There has been enough research on the subject to arrive at a reasonably informed conclusion as to what conssitutes a traditional singer. I suggest David Buchan's 'The Ballad and the Folk', (a little academic, but still readable), Evelyn Wells' 'The Ballad Tree' (extremely readable, but academically flawed), Willa Muir's 'Living With Ballads' (somewhat romantic, but has plenty in it to make it worth a read), Hugh Shields' 'Narrative Singing in Ireland', David Kerr Cameron's 'The Ballad and the Plough'...... and plenty more where they came from, including tons of articals from people like Hamish Henderson, Tom Munnelly, Bert Lloyd..... all dealing with traditional singing in situ. I mentioned it earlier, but the latest on the pile, David Gregory's 'The Late Victorian Folk Song Revival' seems an excellent source of information on traditional singers and their repertoires (haven't had time to read it in full yet, but have read enought to give me the impression of an extremely valuable piece of research).
It seems a feature of todays revival to overlook or deliberately ignore the libraries of work that have been published on subjects like the tradition, folk, the ballads..... in order to manipulate the language and prove that black is white and to fit square pegs into round holes. If the work that has been done by people like Lloyd, Sharp, Lomax, et al is flawed, by all means put it up for knocking down, but to ignore it seems like an attempt to mount a takeover bid (often hostile) on the English language.
I'm disappointed not to have been able to take part fully in this discussion; it is an excellent one, but I like Liberty Boy (hi Jerry) feel it would be a pity to stop now.
Jim Carroll