I live in Minnesota and I have visited folk clubs in Britain, and I have to say I have NEVER encountered anything quite like a British folk club in America. The venues we DO have tend to fall into these categories:

(1) Concert-type venues where you pay $15 or more for a ticket, sit in a theater-type seat alongside a hundred or more other audience members, and where NO ALCOHOL IS SERVED.

(2) Bars that are smoky, noisy and crowded, where the music is free but the drinks are expensive, where most patrons ignore the musicians and shout into one another's ears for conversation.

(3) Coffeehouses where the musicians play for tips and free coffee, and are likely to be high-school or college students who got their first guitar six months ago, and learned all the songs they know from their parents' old Bobby Goldsboro albums, and NO ALCOHOL IS SERVED.

(4) Outdoor summer festivals where you pay $15 or more for admission, and BEER IS SERVED, but the beer tent is 200 yards away from the music tent, and the port-a-potties are 200 yards off in another direction, and to get to either of them you have to run an obstacle course past the stroller-pushing parents and the pottery-browsing tourists and then stand in line for 20 minutes to get your beer, and then you discover that they only accept tickets, not money, for beer, and you first have to stand in another line in another tent to buy your tickets, and when you finally get back to the music tent, you find that the musicians you came to hear are gone and have been replaced by a puppet show or a juggler.