In other words, you want it to look like this, for example: BIG BAD BILL FROM LOUISVILLE in the DT.

I have 2 problems with John's suggestion:

1. Search engines. You can't search for, and find, a phrase from the lyrics if the phrase as posted is interrupted with a chord symbol. Since I do a lot of searching in response to requests for lyrics, I encounter this problem a lot.

2. Spell checkers. Spelling errors are rife in both Mudcat and the DT, usually due to pure carelessness—i.e. lack of proofreading—by people who post lyrics. Personally, whenever I post lyrics, even if I copy them from another website, I copy and paste them to Microsoft Word first, and run the spell checker, as well as doing a careful visual proofread, before I copy and paste again to Mudcat. I wish others would do the same. Spelling errors also make lyrics impossible to find with a search engine. (Dialect is another problem, but I won't go into that.) I hope the people who are harvesting songs for the DT are checking them for spelling errors.

The difficulty is that, embedding chords into lyrics causes practically every word with a chord preceding it to be flagged as an error, thus making error-checking more tedious than it needs to be. You can decrease the problem to some extent by leaving a space after the bracket, but that still leaves the problem of chords that come in the middle of a word.

Personally, I prefer to have chords above the lyrics, but since I am not a musician myself, I suppose my preference doesn't carry much weight. Also, I don't use any of the software mentioned here.

If people insist on having embedded chords, then I would prefer that they post two copies of each set of lyrics, one with, and one without, chords. And, needless to say, the copy without chords should be rigorously checked for spelling errors.