Great beat. . .

. . . easy to dance to.

Remember those words on American Bandstand when Dick Clark asked a couple of lucky guests to rate tunes? For what it’s worth, nothing has ever been easy for me to dance to.

I like the Folk Alley feature which allows us to rate the music played but I sometimes struggle with the relationship between the number of stars and the descriptive adjective. As you probably know, we can give each song a star rating ranging from a high of five stars (outstanding) to a low of one star (bad). In between, we have four stars (great), three stars (good), and two stars (fair),

Do you take the opportunity to rate the songs? I do but have to confess that when a song is played which I enjoy, I hesitate to give it fewer than five stars even though I think most artists would be happy to hear any of their songs described as ‘great’ (which to me has a more enduring quality than ‘outstanding’).

The star system is good (great? outstanding?); we understand it viscerally and intuitively. When you rate the songs here, are you considering the desciptive words provided? Would you suggest others? Or does it make folk music competitive in a way it was never meant to be?