Sorry, Jim, I'm still flummoxed. I stand by the 2 statements you quote AND I stand by the 90% figure. I don't see how they contradict each other in any way?????

Okay so I used the word 'retirement' but if you look at it carefully the crucial statement is saying exactly the opposite to what you were criticising. ........'not many made it to retirement' so how could I be saying they made them up in their retirement?

Dick,
The main thrust of my argument was NOT that the country people didn't make songs, but that there was little incentive for them to do so as there were plenty of songs coming out of the towns and coming down from above in the period under discussion. Clearly some country people did make songs, those with a modicum of literacy, but for whatever reason only a small percentage made it into the national corpus that remained to be recorded by the likes of Sharp.