Ray Hair is the 11^th International President of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada. Ray negotiates the federation’s international agreements with the sound recording industry, the motion picture and television industries and other industry associations that employ professional musicians.

A professional musician who has performed all styles of popular music for over 45 years, Ray holds music degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of North Texas, where he taught drum set and percussion from 1975 through 1983.

Ray was elected President-Secretary of the Fort Worth Professional Musicians Association in 1983, and was first elected to AFM’s International Executive Board in 1989, a position he held when elected as International President in June, 2010. He facilitated a merger of the Fort Worth and Dallas musicians’ unions in 1991, creating the largest entertainment union in the southwest, now headquartered in Arlington, Texas.

Ray served for two decades as a member of the Executive Board of the Tarrant County Central Labor Council in Fort Worth, Texas and is a member of the Labor Advisory Committee for U.S. Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy. He is co-chair of the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund, and represents the AFM’s 80,000 members on the boards of the AFM-AFTRA Fund and SoundExchange, organizations which collect and distribute intellectual property rights royalties in accordance with U.S. and international copyright laws.