McGrath of Harlow said, in part:

That's the meaning I prefer to retain, under which "sophisticated" is an insult not a compliment. After all it was the word used for practice of some grocers who put sand in the sugar, and milkmen who put water in the milk, or publicans who watered the beer.

And in that sense I'm more than happy to agree that real folk music is never sophisticated.

Are you telling us, McGrath, that "the folk" never cheat or lie? Oh, come onnnnn!!!

Seems to me that, rather than "sophisticated" or "unsophisticated", it might be said that the folk attitude or process is not self-conscious.
In the folk process, the singing, the making up, the passing on of songs just is, for the pleasure of it, not concerned with formal musical niceties, not particularly concerned whether this song makes money, whether this song meets any kind of academic criteria, or even whether this song will continue to be sung in the future. It deals with what is in the memory now, with what gives pleasure to sing or hear now. What will happen to the song later, what critics might say about it, whether it will make money (and the like) are all extraneous matters, and to the extent they are present warp, change, or contraindicate the folk process.

Now, I sing what some (and even I) sometimes call folk songs, and usually I subscribe to what I said in the preceding paragraph. Really what I'm doing is singing songs with a certain character I think is similar to what we find in folk songs. I know, however, that by my own criteria I'm not a member of the folk in that sense, because I know too much, am too conscious of the nature and origin of the songs I sing. Besides that, precious few of the songs I sing come to me just by absorption from what granddad or Aunt Jane sang, by unthought, undesigned tradition.

Dave Oesterreich