Al - I can reasonably surmise that my ancestors were living, working, and carousing,
in the towns and villages where Cecil Sharpe was collecting songs...

If those songs were a vital element of their culture and social lives,
it certainly was no longer the case by my childhood in the early 1960s.

In my small town my only exposure to anything remotely 'folk song'
was the few times I was dragged to Sunday School,
and a weird looking uncle who played guitar and sang Burl Ives songs
at a cousins birthday party..

Perhaps it's not unreasonable to speculate that west country factory fodder workers
living in small town council estates,
just didn't like old fashioned songs their grand parents may have sang in fields
when Victoria was still on the throne...

That is until Adge Cutler and The Wurzels scraped into the pop charts in 1967...???

My experience is of a radio and TV folk revival in the late 60s, early 70s...
..and a few Art centre 'folk' concerts by the likes of Jake Thackerey and Brenda Wooton in the mid 70s...

Scrumpyshire may have been a mother load of songs for the Edwardian collectors,
but those olds songs must have lost their appeal to us locals within a few decades later...???

Who knows.. ask an expert...

All I know is TV and radio played a major role in getting me and my schoolmates interested in them again...