Banner & Company
Banner & Company is a weekly interview podcast from the Nashville Banner hosted by Nashville media legend Demetria Kalodimos.
Episodes
October 12, 2025 • 40 mins
This week, Bob Bernstein announced that beloved Hillsboro Village coffee shop Fido will be closing — three years from now, on June 1, 2028. In the announcement, which was posted below a digital countdown clock, he wrote: "As leases expired, many of those who put their savings and dreams into their small businesses and created the look, feel and taste of Nashville became victims of their own success." The news sparked conversations ...
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October 5, 2025 • 42 mins
Growing up, Stephen Bargatze got into plenty of trouble. He wasn't a very good student. His home life was rocky at best, and he had a terrible relationship with his mother. But with some help from family, he got a chance to turn his life around. And when he found he had some skill at magic tricks, his world brightened a bit. Then he discovered that with clown make-up on, "talking funny" was actually an asset.
These days, Stephen ...
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September 28, 2025 • 36 mins
Liz McLaurin looks at the landscape a little different than the rest of us. As the head of the nonprofit Land Trust for Tennessee, she works with landowners who want to set aside some (or all) of their property for conservation. So when she sees forests and farmlands, she's not just thinking about what's there now; she's also thinking about what that land might look like decades or even centuries from now. Will it be protected and ...
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September 21, 2025 • 36 mins
Shane Caldwell got his start on public access television as "kind of a goof," after watching a comedy show and thinking he and his fellow bartender friends could do much better. What they came up with, The Sylvan Brothers, became an underground sensation. That led to a local sketch comedy show called Cuts that aired right after Saturday Night Live. The first musical guest? Vince Gill.
The child of performers, Shane hails from Sava...
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September 14, 2025 • 43 mins
You should never meet your heroes, the old saying goes. But for Jim McGuire, it has turned out pretty well. Jim grew up listening to country radio, and then — after a roundabout path took him to an Army base in Oklahoma, then to Vietnam and eventually to Nashville — he made a career capturing photos of some of the stars he had once only known through their music.
He started out in an old grocery store that he converted into a phot...
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September 7, 2025 • 34 mins
Tamara Saviano has worked in radio, been a publicist — Kris Kristofferson was a client — served as president of the Americana Music Association (the first woman to do so), and produced albums and award shows at the Ryman Auditorium. All of this has given her an inside view of the Americana scene from the very start. If that sounds like a singularly winding career path, you can now read about it in her new memoir.
This week, Tamara...
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August 31, 2025 • 52 mins
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved African Americans established and settled Promise Land in Dickson County. They came from farms around Charlotte, Tennessee, and from Cumberland Furnace, the nearby ironworks town. Some of the first settlers, like Ed Vanleer and John Nesbitt served with the United States Colored Troops during the war. The town remained independent, and actually flourished through the Jim Crow...
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August 24, 2025 • 38 mins
Aaron Gray found peace after enduring the unthinkable. His 5-month-old son Joel died in August 2012 after Gray’s then wife accidentally left the baby in the back seat of the family car. But Gray didn’t allow Joel’s death to shatter his life forever — he found peace in nature as he learned to untangle and release his trauma.
Gray used the worst moment in his life as a catalyst to help him help others. Through his podcast, Guys Deal...
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August 17, 2025 • 42 mins
From the time she job-shadowed at the Jackson Sun in 8th grade, Becca Andrews knew she wanted to be a journalist. This aspiration took her from Tennessee to California and back again as she began an award-winning career as an investigative reporter. Andrews’ extensive coverage of reproductive healthcare and right-wing extremism prepared her for her latest project, American Shrapnel.
As co-writer and cohost, Andrews retraces the vi...
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August 10, 2025 • 39 mins
On Tuesday, the state of Tennessee executed Byron Black, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 for the murders of his then-girlfriend Angela Clay and her two daughters, nine-year-old Latoya and six-year-old Lakeisha. Black, who was intellectually disabled, had an implanted defibrillator that his attorney argued could cause undue suffering if it attempted to shock his heart as execution drugs took effect. Ultimately, afte...
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August 3, 2025 • 34 mins
What started as an ordinary ride home from a track meet changed Cathy Carillo's life. When Metro Police stopped her father for a broken taillight in 2009, they arrested him, and he was later deported. Cathy, who was 14 years old at the time, was left stranded on the side of the road and wondering: “Is this really home?”
That night set Cathy on a 15-year path that recently led to helping found The ReMIX Tennessee, a grassroots Lati...
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July 27, 2025 • 40 mins
When he first arrived in Nashville sight unseen, Ron Brice was just here for a job — running a video arcade. So how did a Michigander with no background in music aside from being a fan end up owning one of the city's most important independent venues? That story involves a gym, a professional wrestler, a Mexican restaurant and a whole lot of sweat equity.
The club Ron eventually opened up, Third & Lindsley, has hosted some of the ...
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July 20, 2025 • 33 mins
Not many people have held Hank Williams demo recordings with his handwriting on them. But Alan Stoker has. He recently retired from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, where he worked for 50 years, much of it spent preserving and archiving rare — and sometimes fragile — recordings. He was there long enough that some of the recordings he archived he returned to a second time in order to digitize.
Alan was born into a musical...
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July 13, 2025 • 33 mins
"I guess I'm a completist," artist Wendy Murray says of herself. And right now she has an appropriately ambitious project under way: drawing every building on Gallatin Pike. Or, as she likes to say, "the Gallatin Pike" (an homage to Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip). Maybe you've seen her out with pens and museum board, sketching that day's subject.
Originally from New Zealand, Wendy has taught art at Sydney Universi...
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July 6, 2025 • 34 mins
This month marks 100 years since the Scopes "monkey" trial in Dayton, Tenn. The simple version is that a 24-year-old teacher had been charged with breaking a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. But as national press descended on this small Tennessee town — at least 150 reporters and photographers in all — it soon became clear that this was bigger than a simple criminal trial. It was as if science itself stood accused.
...
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June 29, 2025 • 38 mins
Maryam Abolfazli was born and raised in Nashville, into what she describes as a "a big and loving Iranian family." Some members of that family still live in Iran, where, already contending with a repressive government, they have also lived in a time of war and now, lingering uncertainty.
All of this hits close to home for Maryam, who has worked in the Middle East and retains close ties with her extended family. As a fragile cease...
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June 22, 2025 • 26 mins
The late Dr. Paul Kwami was the music director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers for 28 years. He passed away in September 2022. Before his death, Dr. Kwami recorded an interview for a documentary project about Nashville music venues, which has not been heard until now. This week's episode, drawn from Banner Executive Producer Demetria Kalodimos' archives, also features the Fisk Jubilee Singers in their first-ever performance at the Blue...
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June 15, 2025 • 37 mins
When the Banner needed someone to sketch the recent trial of Glen Casada and Cade Cothren in federal court — where no cameras or digital devices of any kind are allowed — we turned to artist Paul Collins. His courtroom sketches, created on paper with pencil, marker and other dry materials, brought the trial to life for our coverage, along with several other Nashville outlets.
Paul knew from a young age that he wanted to be an arti...
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June 8, 2025 • 34 mins
Phil Bredesen is a big believer in the public good. As mayor of Nashville, he pushed to create more public spaces, like the downtown public library. He also sought to invigorate the core of the city, in part by bringing big-time sports to town. (Wait until you hear the story of how he got to the final handshake on an NFL franchise.) As governor of Tennessee, Phil worked to acquire and preserving public land.
These days, fishing an...
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June 1, 2025 • 37 mins
Music historian Don Cusic has played many roles — songwriter, producer, novelist, professor. (Not to mention putting in a stint at a newspaper in Cookeville many years ago.) Decades ago, he pulled into Nashville in an old VW bus that doubled as his home until he found his footing writing about music.
Since then, Don has written 28 books, ranging from a biography of Roger Miller to an encyclopedia of cowboys. His latest delves into...
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