The History of Music
                By Pete Seeger's dad.
"My Father explained pop music this way;he said,thousands of years ago,when our ancestors lived in tribes,there was one kind of music in the tribe.
All the men knew the same warrior songs,and the same hunting songs and all the women knew the same lullabies.

Then clever people discovered agriculture - how to herd sheep,how to grow grain- and now there were two classes of people:You had a class of people that owned land, another class of people that worked the land.
And then cities developed and you had a class of people that lived in the cities and they were a middle class ...
But the ruling class had music made for them. so expert musicians made expert music, in the castles and it led to symphony orchestras in the 18th century,...
Out in the country people played their old music like they'd always played it, just by ear,and it didn't change that much. ..
But in the cities musicians found they could pick up coins in the marketplace, and this was the first pop music. And pop music has throughout the ages changed more rapidly than either fine arts music or Folk music.
It has borrowed a melody from the castle or a melody from the countryside."

The above quote is from an interview with Pete Seeger in the current issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
Yes it generalises, yes it oversimplifies but nevertheless I think it is a fine assessment of the importance of popular music.
What do you think?