Former Country Music Hall of Fame Great Dies: Bill Ivey Was 81

Bill Ivey, whose 25-year tenure as CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum helped cement the landmark as a Nashville institution, died on Nov. 7. He was 81 years old.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum announced Ivey’s death on Tuesday, praising the former CEO as “a challenging thinker” who helped secure the landmark’s reputation as “a significant and authoritative music history center” and made an “incalculable” impact on the museum as well as the “wider arts world.”

Ivey was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1944, and went on to earn a history degree at the University of Michigan before furthering his education with a master’s degree in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University.

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Ivey was doing graduate work toward a Ph.D. in 1971 when he was hired for a job as director of the library at the Country Music Foundation, the umbrella nonprofit for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

While at the library, Ivey “so impressed” the board that he was promoted to director of the Country Music Foundation by the fall of the year he was hired, and over the next 25 years, he “steadily built the staff and collections of the Museum,” setting a “rigorous standard that ensured the Museum’s collections of artifacts, recordings, and library materials documenting country music would be unmatched.”

Ivey presided over two building expansions during his time as CEO, “and through his leadership, the Museum was transformed from a modest tourist attraction into the premier center for the preservation and study of country music past and present.”

In December 1997, President Bill Clinton chose Ivey as the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, a role in which he spent four years before directing the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University while serving on the faculty there from 2002 to 2012.

Ivey also served as president of the Recording Academy, chair of the Recording Academy’s board of trustees, and president of the American Folklore Society at various times, also founding the Leadership Music nonprofit networking forum in 1989.

Ivey wrote liner notes for many historical albums and scholarly articles, and he also published three books — Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy, and Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America.