Q:

What is the use of pickup notes?

I was looking through some sheet music, when I noticed quite a few pieces had pickup notes. What is the use of a pickup note? Here is an image:

A:

Pickup notes are just a symptom of the fact that many melodies don't start on one of the intuitive downbeats, but between two of them. If the notation bothers you, you can always rewrite such music by inserting a bunch of rests before the pickup note, so that the first bar is a complete bar.

