Banner & Company

Long before Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter album re-ignited the conversation, Frankie Staton was booking showcases aimed at highlighting Nashville's Black country music talent, which remained hidden in the mix. "I knew that I was not the only Black person that was being treated the way I was being treated," she says. A North Carolina native inspired to move to Music City by the likes of Loretta Lynn and...

Elisheba Mrozik is probably best known as a tattooer: She made an appearance on the TV show Inkmaster and owns her own shop in North Nashville. But she’s also a painter, muralist and textile artist who uses whatever medium she’s working in to explore community and cultural interconnectedness. And yes, some of that work involves fermenting mud. An artist from an early age — including an elementary...

For our premiere episode, we broke from our usual one-on-one format to bring you an abbreviated — but nonetheless colorful and complicated — history of the Nashville Banner: a look at the days of a two-newspaper city, from people who lived it, day in and day out, in the storied newsroom at 1100 Broadway. This episode was first broadcast in April 2024. Guests Parker Toler, paperboy Mary Hance, repo...

From a young age, Hal Cato knew he wanted to help others — from a chance encounter with a senior in an assisted living center to recruiting friends to help him deliver Meals on Wheels. That drive has brought him into leadership at some of Nashville's most prominent nonprofits — including Hands On Nashville, Oasis Center and Thistle Farms. And it brought him very close to a run for mayor. "I'm stil...

President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations, raising questions about the feasibility of such an operation and, at the same time, causing fear in immigrant communities across the country. Here in Nashville, local authorities have stayed away from strident rhetoric, but this week Tennessee lawmakers introduced two bills aimed at undocumented immigrants — one that would require law en...

The 2024 election in the books. At the city level, Mayor Freddie O'Connell's transit measure won big. What was different this time, as opposed to the failed 2018 plan? As expected, Republicans dominated statewide elections, but what comes next for Democrats, who eked out a must-win seat in the state legislature but made no significant gains? And with a second Trump administration on the horizon, w...

As of November 2024, the account A Girl Has No President has more than 820,000 followers on Instagram. That following includes scores of celebrities. But the creator of the account chooses to stay anonymous, in part because of threats against her and her family, and in part because she is not interested in notoriety. She also rarely grants interviews, but made an exception for this episode of Bann...

On a cold night in 1985, the Rev. Charles Strobel, then pastor at Holy Name Catholic Church in East Nashville, invited the people who were trying to sleep in the parking lot to come inside. This gesture, which he already knew might alter the course of his life, eventually grew into a citywide program known as Room In The Inn, now comprising 200 congregations, offering shelter and warm meals to tho...

In some ways, his upbringing helped prepare Tyler Mahan Coe for creating the breakout country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones. After all, his father is David Allan Coe, and Tyler spent more than a decade touring with him as a member of his band. He also has childhood memories of stars like George Jones, thanks to a connection with producer Billy Sherrill. But even that kind of proximit...

A few days before Christmas in 2008, a six-story tall, 84-acre mound of coal ash — a byproduct of burning coal — collapsed at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tenn. The toxic sludge burst through a retaining embankment, knocked houses of their foundations and tossed cars around like toys. All in all, a billion gallons of toxic sludge filled the Emory River and 300 acres of the surroundin...

For Nashville native Anne Byrn, baking is an art, and everyone who mixes, measures and bakes is an artist in their own right — whether that means following a beloved recipe to the letter, or improvising to get the taste just right. Her own mother was an excellent home cook who only had to read a recipe to know what it would taste like. And she was an early influence on Anne, who is now a bestselli...

With no budget and no blueprint, Hazel Joyner-Smith programmed her first film festival in just two weeks. It was a whirlwind experience, but she got it done. And she hasn't looked back since. The International Black Film Festival has been going strong here in Nashville for two decades, and this year's edition, which begins this week, showcases a range of films from features to shorts to documentar...

With his brightly colored designs — everything from ears of corn to New York City skyscrapers — painter Myles Maillie has made a name for himself in Nashville's art scene. There's a good chance you've seen someone wearing one of his hand-painted shirts or aprons. The bold, pop-art style is hard to miss, as is Myles himself, whose flair for color extends to his wardrobe. For decades, Myles kept at...

Sept. 9, 1957 was MaryAnne MacKenzie's first day teaching sixth grade at Hattie Cotton School in East Nashville. It was also the first day of Nashville's desegregation of public schools. One Black girl showed up for class at Hattie Cotton that day, and for the anti-integration crowd, one Black student was one too many. In the dead of night, 99 someone detonated 99 sticks of dynamite, blowing apart...

North Nashville is an important, historic area and home to some of the city's most significant institutions. But it's also a place that has seen disruption, unrest and neglect. Decades ago, the interstate cut the community in half — literally — displacing residents and shuttering businesses. But for those who have chosen to stay, North Nashville has always been a place that is more than the sum of...

When Smyrna native Gerold Oliver takes the stage, he has a way of winning over audiences. He's currently playing the role of Orlando in the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of As You Like It — which features plenty of music and Gerold on guitar. And soon, he'll also be starring in The Best School Year Ever at the Nashville Children's Theater, where he's artist in residence. Gerold keeps...

Five-star recruit Morgan Price made headlines in 2022 when she decided to de-commit from an SEC program in order to join Fisk University's brand-new gymnastics team — a first for a historically Black university or college. It was a fortuitous decision for the Lebanon, Tenn., native, who not only moved closer to her hometown after years pursuing the sport in Texas, but also fulfilled a lifelong wis...

As a journalist and author, Amanda Little has written about the environment, energy, technology and the future of food production — traveling to far-flung locations, meeting people around the world and eating lab-created meat out of a bioreactor. As a professor, she's worked to pass along the skills she's learned along the way, by trial and error, of reporting and storytelling. Her newest endeavor...

Henry Martin thought he might spend a few years as federal public defender, then return to private practice as a slightly older and much wiser attorney. That was almost 40 years ago. Today, he's the longest serving federal defender in the entire country, and over his long career, he's worked alongside some of Nashville's finest legal minds. Henry has also had some fascinating clients — a list that...

In the 1990s Jeff Holmes, and his college buddy Scot Evans started a band called The Floating Men, which quickly became one of Nashville’s most consistent live acts — blending rock, pop and jazzy interludes. As the crowds that came to see them grew, they garnered lots of of attention from big-time record labels, even if executives didn’t really know what to do with them. As they watched talented p...

María Magdalena Campos-Pons was born in Cuba, and spent her formative years in Matanzas, known as the "Athens of Cuba." It is perhaps fitting that her journey has brought her to Nashville, the "Athens of the South," where she teaches at Vanderbilt and makes art that is known around the world for its vivid storytelling around identity. Her work appears around the world, and is part of more than 30...

With neo-Nazis demonstrating around Nashville, including at a Metro Council meeting from which they were eventually expelled, the city has been on edge. It's the second such group in as many weeks to bring their racist messaging to the streets of downtown and beyond, and some Nashvillians have shown up to oppose them publicly. Dr. Sophie Bjork-James is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt Universi...

Attorney Rose Palermo still keeps an office on Music Row, where she got her start in the ’70s representing musicians. When some of those musicians started getting divorced, she took on that work, too. It helps to know the business, after all. Eventually there was so much divorce work she had to choose, and she chose divorce — though not for herself. (She and fellow attorney Denty Cheatham remain h...

For the better part of a decade, historian Betsy Phillips has been trying to get the truth about three Civil Rights-era bombings in Nashville: Hattie Cotton school in September 1957; the Jewish Community Center in March 1958; and the home of attorney and councilmember Z. Alexander Looby in April 1960. It has been painstaking work involving archival searches, Freedom of Information Act requests for...

In the early 1970s, the Metro Nashville Police Department had no women working patrol. Valerie Meece was one of the first two women to step into that work — even if there were no women's police uniforms available at the time. And while there were plenty of men on the force who didn't think women had any business doing police work, she was undeterred. And she found allies, working her way up and re...