Black Hawk, I think the use of the term "acoustic" to describe material that sometimes overlaps with "folk" is simply borne out of people's searching for a term (other than "folk") which can be applied to said material. I see it as a tryout, and by no means as an established term - yet.

Howard Jones said "I have to admit to being unclear by what criteria some modern songwriters are accepted as "folk" while others are not." Well, you and me together, and I am trying to be one of the very ones you refer to. Overall, I would refer to myself as a songwriter, full-stop. I would be the first to admit that some of my material does not belong to the genre (and I do not play them at folk club gigs, but I do include them in albums). But some of the material does move towards that wide and undefined category that the majority of people refer to as "folk". How can I tell? I don't know, the best way I can describe it is to do with the choice of subjects and the approach to them, the storytelling and picture-painting rather than the music itself. That's how it works for me, in my own mind.

By the same token, I consider some songs that sprang out of the pop or rock world to be worthy of inclusion into the same above category, irrespective of the fact that the people that wrote or made them popular are not accepted as folk artists. Such songs for example, would be "Penny Lane" and "Eleanor Rigby", Mark Knopfler's "Prairie wedding" and "Sailing to Philadelphia", Billy Joel's "And so it goes" and the "Piano man".

So whether the song is, or is not, "folk" (always in the wider-than-1954-sense, erroneous or not) has nothing to do with who wrote or sang it. The characteristics - for me - are in the song itself, not in the provenance or how it is delivered.