Bill Ivey (1944–2025)

Bill Ivey, past president of the American Folklore Society (AFS) and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), died on November 7, 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of eighty-one.

Born in Detroit in 1944, Ivey earned an undergraduate history degree at the University of Michigan and then an M.A. in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University (IU). He left IU as a Ph.D. Candidate in 1971 to apply for a library job at the Country Music Foundation (CMF), the umbrella nonprofit for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He was promoted to director of the CMF in the same year and led the Museum through 1997. During his tenure, the Museum gained national accreditation, its budget increased fourfold, and its staff and programs grew accordingly.

In December 1997, Ivey was nominated by President Bill Clinton as the seventh NEA chair and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Shortly after serving in that role, he spearheaded a five-year strategic plan which later became the basis for Challenge America—a program that targeted support to arts education, services for young people, cultural heritage preservation, community partnerships, and expanded access. He also initiated a wide range of National Millennium Projects, such as the Favorite Poem Project and Continental Harmony, to help Americans celebrate the new century. He was at the NEA through 2001.

Ivey also served two terms as chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, and was founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University (2003). He had received honorary doctorates from IU, Michigan Technological University, University of Michigan, and Wayne State University.

Ivey was AFS president in 2006 and 2007. He was instrumental in formalizing the organization’s China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project, on which he continued to advise. He was a generous supporter of AFS and a champion for raising the public profile of the field. In recognition of his extraordinary contributions in service to advance the visibility and impact of the field of folklore studies, Ivey received the AFS Judith McCulloh Award for Lifetime Service to the Field in 2022.

• Read the National Endowment for the Arts’ statement on the death of former NEA Chairman, Bill Ivey.
• Read more about his life in the Facebook post by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
• Read the In Memoriam article (in Chinese) by Chao Gejin, past president of the China Folklore Society.