One widely used definition is simply “Folk music is what the people sing.”For Scholes, as well as for Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartók, there was a sense of the music of the country as distinct from that of the town. Folk music was already, “…seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived),” particularly in “a community uninfluenced by art music” and by commercial and printed song.