You're talking entirely about content then, rather than musical form. I'd say that the content - if it's really "relevant" to anything, is relevant to larger things than those "here and now" things that pertaoin only to a particular culture. For that matter, a paarticular piece of a given culture. There are many blacks today who could not - according to your lights, as I read you - sincerely relate to "traditional" blues. Partly because many of them simply don't wake up in the mornin' to believe they'll dust their broom any more. IOW, what you seem to be saying is that educated, middle class WHITE folk (maybe you're saying ANY white folk, I dunno) can't "connect" to "traditional" blues because we don't pick cotton. True enough. Equally true of lotsa black folks.

How do we acquire "traditions" if we don't "adopt" them? And who's to say we can't "unadopt" some that don't please us? I'm afraid I'm still a little foggy as to the real thrust of this thread. The answer to "how does a person pick up traditions other than those of the cultural milieu in which one was raised?" is simply "one grows up and gets educated and sees & hears the world and realizes that one's little corner of childhood was rather small and limited." No? The answer to "Why does one leave the tradition to which one was yatta yattaa" is exactly the same answer as the other one.