one reason why pop songs and beatle songs cannot become folk songs is that they are not altered by oral transmission except possibly when sung at football matches, but if sung in folk clubs they are sung in my experience as they were written, if one takes the 1954 definition then by this judgement they will never be folk songs because they are not folkprocessed.

Somebody who performs a note-perfect replica of what a "source singer" recorded 50 years ago is doing exactly what a covers band does with the Beatles (in fact the covers band is more likely to introduce changes). So where's the difference?

We owe the survival of our ballads and many narrative songs to communities that were overwhelmingly illiterate - the Travellers

Twaddle. Not one of the ballads in Child's collection came through any Traveller source, neither did anything Sharp collected, and only a handful of songs in the Greig-Duncan collection. The vast corpus of British folksongs owes nothing to the Travellers. It was interesting to find a bunch of people singing those songs by oral transmission as late as the Fifties, but that is absolutely as far as it goes. We have no reason to think that their performance style has anything to do with any ancient and general tradition either - there are plenty of old recording by non-Travellers that sound completely unlike the Stewarts of Blair orthodoxy. Traveller culture is a nice historical footnote but no more. And it has zero relevance to the current UK scene.