Country Music Expert to Head NEA
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WASHINGTON — President Clinton has chosen a leading expert on country music to lead the troubled National Endowment for the Arts.
William J. Ivey, 53, heads the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tenn., which runs the Nashville studio where Elvis Presley used to record.
“The NEA is an agency that I care a lot about personally,” Ivey said Friday. “It’s an honor to be a candidate for that job.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Ivey would oversee spending $98 million on the arts this budget year, a sum won in a hard fight with Congress by his predecessor, actress Jane Alexander. The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives had agreed to abolish the agency, sharply criticized by members for subsidizing some artwork they considered pornographic.
Ivey has headed the Nashville foundation for more than 25 years and has taught at both Brooklyn College and Vanderbilt University.
He is known in Washington for his advocacy of preserving historical recordings of classical and popular music.
Ivey is a Detroit native with a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.
An amateur guitarist and songwriter, he has served on the board of the American Folklore Society.
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