"The best in acoustic music: contemporary and traditional folk, country, blues, comedy, jazz and standards"
This is the promotional description used by a well-established Midlands folk club. Whilst one might question whether any local club can offer "the best", there is little doubt that the rest of the sentence gives a very fair description of what you will find on one of their club nights. When I arrived in Birmingham, nearly 50 years ago, there were at least 5 folk clubs operating in the city centre with a strong focus on traditional song. This not to say that you would only hear traditional song as at least 2 of these clubs had residents performing music hall songs and "new" songs by the likes of Ewen MacColl and Bill Caddick. Now only one of these clubs remains- The Black Diamond. Whilst there are plenty of other clubs and singarounds in the local area, most are of the "anything goes" variety and traditional songs are less commonly heard than they used to be.
It is interesting that nearly all of these clubs still choose to call themselves folk clubs and that suggests to me that folk is not a dirty four-letter word; it's just that for many people now it has become a generic word for "anything goes" music.