Some fifteen years or so back, I was fortunate to meet with a octogenarian singer and ex-miner who'd lived all his life in the Durham Coalfield. He was highly entertaining on various subjects, and told me all about the cigar-box fiddles they used to make & play in 4 part harmony. However, when I asked him about Folk Songs, he didn't know what I was talking about. I sang him snatches of The Collier's Rant and The Blackleg Miner but he'd never heard of them, nor of anything like them, which gave me significant pause for thought. Of course this is just one person, but one steeped in over 80 years of mining history & culture, active socially and politically throughout, so when one hears of Ewan McColl & Bert Lloyd giving concerts of folk songs in the WMC at Tow Law to the baffled locals, one begins to suspect that all is not as it first appears!

To quote WalkaboutsVerse on the Chords in Folk thread: Traditions exist due to folks being impressed by how their forebears did things, a notion which would at least have the appearance of plausibility about it. However the caveat must be that traditions only exist in the imaginations of the impressed, and that their forebears (or more likely not their forebears at all...) had no concept of tradition as we understand it today, much less The Tradition.