The Society for Ethnomusicology is pleased to welcome Bill Ivey as the 2007 Seeger Lecture at the annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Bill Ivey is the Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, an arts policy research center with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, DC, and is President of the American Folklore Society for 2006 and 2007. He also serves as Senior Consultant to Leadership Music, a music industry professional development program, and chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a federally chartered foundation affiliated with the Library of Congress. He is currently board chairman of WPLN, Nashville Public Radio, and is completing a book about the public interest and America's cultural system. From May, 1998 through September, 2001, Ivey served as the seventh Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency. Following years of controversy and significant budget cuts, Ivey's leadership is credited with restoring Congressional confidence in the work of the NEA. Ivey's Challenge America Initiative, launched in 1999, has to date garnered more than $19 million in new Congressional appropriations for the Arts Endowment. Prior to government service, Ivey was director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee. He was twice elected board chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Ivey holds degrees in folklore, history, and ethnomusicology, as well as honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Indiana University. He is a four-time Grammy Award nominee (Best Album Notes category), and is the author of numerous articles on US cultural policy and folk and popular music. His newest book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights will be published by the University of California Press in 2008.