Sam Lee isn’t himself a Traveller, but he’s keeping their musical heritage moving forward. And if that’s a rather enigmatic statement, especially for North Americans, he’s happy to explain.

“There are three distinct nomadic groups in Britain,” the 35-year-old singer says on his cellphone from New York City, where he seems to be taking a brisk walk through the Lower East Side.

“There are the Scottish Travellers, a disenfranchised clan of Pictish tinsmiths from the north who’ve kind of fallen onto the road. They have their own language, the Scottish Cant. There are the Irish Travellers, who are a pre-Celtic community indigenous to Ireland. And then there are the Romany Gypsies, who’ve been in England and Scotland and Ireland for about 600 years but came originally from India and the Hindu Kush. They’re all genetically completely distinct, but they share an enormous amount in terms of the way they keep traditional song alive.”

Living off the grid and following seasonal rhythms rather than a fixed calendar, the Travellers are a cultural anomaly in contemporary Britain. They’re also decidedly endangered, with traditional occupations such as tinsmith and farrier no longer in demand.

Musicologists have no shortage of material to work with in the archives of song collectors such as Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson, but the living tradition is so nearly gone that one of the last great Traveller singers, Stanley Robertson, took the unorthodox step of entrusting his repertoire—and that of his famous aunt, Jeannie Robertson—to someone who wasn’t a blood relation.

Lee, in other words.

“Stanley Robertson, my late teacher, was the link, I guess, the interface between the old world and the modern world,” the London-based singer explains. “He knew that he was the last carrier of his culture.…and he knew that it wasn’t going to be passed on to another Traveller, around the campfire. Those days were over; we’re different. So he was very good at seeing the potential of finding an outsider, a non-Traveller—someone who was there in the modern world who could take on the material and make it popular. And he wanted popularity. He didn’t want to just preserve it the same way it had always been; he knew that it had to develop and evolve. So much credit to him for not wanting to be an old traditionalist!”

Lee imbues those historic songs with such authority that he often seems an old soul, but he’s not bound by the past. The Fade in Time, his extraordinary new release, contains songs about the Napoleonic Wars, a centuries-old murder, and wicked aristocrats, but they’re set within a thoroughly modern sonic matrix that touches on contemporary chamber music, Japanese gagaku, and the art songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

“The thing is that I’m not there to preserve, and I don’t ever claim that it’s my own tradition,” he says. “I’m there as an advocate, a communicator, and a promoter of the culture, but I’m also adapting it for my own purposes, and to suit the needs of the modern community. I look at myself as more of a bridge into the old world. I have this unique and immensely privileged opportunity to be a kind of agent of exchange and understanding—and, god, why wouldn’t anybody want to take on that role if they had the opportunity?”

Sam Lee and Friends play the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Stage 2 on Sunday (July 19).