Richard Bridge: you're getting a bit philosophical now. Whether there is any such thing as a tradition depends very much what you mean by "tradition". Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society", and she was absolutely write in her Oxford tutorial logic chopping mode. There is a set of relationships between individual people. It's just that some other people use the term "society" to describe that construct. She was saying because we invent a word, we haven't invented an object. Much like "religion". Or "tradition". Magritte put it very simply(or possibly very confusingly) by painting a pipe, and writing "This is not a pipe" under it.
However, Richard, whether or not "tradition" exists, or continues to exist,, people will continue to sing and play tunes, whether they are rustic nightingale songs or techno-samba-yurt. And let us hope some of these mixes are tolerable to our grumpy-old-git ears. Otherwise it's back to recordings of William Kimber and Leadbelly. Which are, thank God(does he/she exist?) readily available.