""Folk music is pop music. How else can a classic tune survive, other than being popular How else can a classic tune survive being collected by a knobhead like Cecil Sharp?"

Cecil Sharp decried the bowdlerization of folk music by popular influences to such a degree that he thought that the five-string banjo changed the music by introducing popular elements.

There is a distinct difference between popular music created for a music market than an expression of a folk tradition that lies outside the music market area. This "knobhead" was responsible for a folk music revival and interest in the field that would have been abandoned by the "music merchants". His efforts were prodigious. He went into the backwoods of the US with just tools for annotating music and lyrics by hand when no one else was interested. To call him a "knobhead" is to reveal a level of ignorance that defies
categorization but is reflective of the general dissipating level of education worldwide.

This lack of education is responsible for the terrible standards of writing and composing in much of pop music today.