When we book for the Washington Folk Festival, we require that all of the acts we present are going to have high levels of ability. A clunker of an act doesn't do justice to the ethnicity or genre it represents. That said, we also try to balance genres and ethnicities, making sure to represent different parts of the world and different cultures. There's so much talent in our area that inevitably perfectly competent performers are left out, simply because we only have about 112 hours of stage-space available during the weekend. We'll try to get some of them the next year.

--Charlie Baum, FSGW and WFF