No, "acoustic music" has a very specific meaning these days. Ironically it's almost invariably features a big PA system at the venue, and in any case it means singer-songwriter stuff. I recently saw a web site for the Colchester "Acoustic City" and it makes a point of saying it is not a folk club. Go to an "acoustic music club" and sing an unaccompanied ballad or play a meleodeon or concertina and they'll look at you like you had just jumped off a passing flying saucer.

The Court Sessions in Tooting, South London does not call itself a folk club, but a traditional music and song club, for similar reasons - too many wrong associations i.e. they are following your suggestion.

I'm all for a mixture, but the problem is when a different type of music from what you intended sweeps in and drowns out everything else, or when a type of traditional music is in danger of dying out unless some effort is made to preserve it.

"American folk would be very different if it wasn't for the Irish, Scottish etc influences"
American Folk is Irish, Scottish etc. There was no original American folk tradition before the Europeans invaded (ok there are the Native Americans and where does their culture fit in with all this - another question entirely). And the Irish have also preserved their own traditions in their own communities in America.

It's a very different situation from England, for example, which had an indigenous and varied folk tradition for centuries complete with mixing in from the rest of the UK, Ireland and Europe, but which nearly became extinct until various revivals occurred in the twentieth century.

Anahata