i don't know how relevant this is, but, for what it is worth, I have this quotation from William Butler Yeats above my desk...

"Folk-art is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought and, because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere and, because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all art is rooted"