Jack, you tell me that I and many others are deluded in thinking there is a tradition, and then tell us that tradition is an integral aspect of human culture & have been since the year dot.

There is a difference between Tradition per se and A (or more typically) The Tradition. The first accounts for cultural process / continuity and may be applied to any aspect of cultural flux, including music of whatever idiom. The latter is used by folkies to lay claim to a corpus of Vernacular Popular Song that they had no hand in the creation of but nevertheless have elected themselves its curators and custodians on account of how it has been collected, transcribed, catalogued, stamped, numbered, adapted and manipulated as being somehow Folk Music for these God knows how many years. The very notion of Traditional Music is anathema to musical tradition because, having been collected and subject to taxidermy & taxonomy, it no longer is part of traditional process.