" I suppose is that it seems the beg the question of how much of what he recorded would have disappeared without trace and have been lost forever if he hadn't have done what he did? "

I'm not sure if the end justify the means in "saving" this material, but it is a good question.

I'm not sure if we will ever know. Would there have been others that would have collected these songs? Would they have truly disappeared? If a song has been handed down for generations, would the chain have been broken and the song lost without the intervention of a collector?   We can only speculate.