A little over a year ago, I saw a Facebook post from Demetria Kalodimos, who was Nashville's longest continuously serving evening news anchor at NBC affiliate WSMV. Her co-anchor of 25 years, Dan Miller, passed away in 2009 after suffering a heart attack in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, while attending The Masters golf tournament.
Let's rewind to 1980, when Dan began hosting a weekly interview show on then-WSM-TV called Miller & Company. During his time as host, he interviewed such luminaries as Johnny Cash and his mother Carrie, Reba McEntire, Minnie Pearl, Tammy Wynette, Jay Leno, Jim Varney, Barbara Mandrell, and Jerry "The King" Lawler, among countless others. It was appointment television, and portions of his interviews with Johnny and Carrie Cash, as well as Reba McEntire, have appeared in retrospective specials and documentaries for decades.
Miller & Company took a hiatus in 1986 when Dan left Nashville to become the principal anchor at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles. He later became the announcer and sidekick for former WSM-TV voiceover artist turned weekend weatherman Pat Sajak on his short-lived CBS late-night program, The Pat Sajak Show. Dan returned to Nashville in 1992 and resurrected Miller & Company as a weekday afternoon show on The Nashville Network (TNN). When its run on TNN ended, WSMV picked up the program, where it continued until 1995, when it was discontinued in favor of a 5 PM newscast.
From 2006 until his passing in 2009, Dan authored a daily blog of essays called Dan Miller's Notebook, hosted on a platform called Typepad.
Now, back to Demetria's Facebook post.
At the end of September 2025, ironically on Dan's birthday, Typepad was shutting down, and Dan's widow, Karen, was looking for help moving his blog to another service so his writing wouldn't be lost. Since Karen wasn't on social media, Demetria used her considerable reach in Nashville to put the word out on her behalf.
I immediately raised my hand to help.
Fast forward to September of this year, when I received a call from Karen. A producer at WSMV had come across some old Miller & Company tapes and wanted to begin digitizing them so we could determine how and where to make them available.
Karen owns the rights to the programs, so I got to work setting up YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram accounts for the show. The WSMV producer had already digitized a handful of episodes and sent them my way. We knew our first release needed to pack a punch, and of the episodes available, I chose Dan's March 28, 1981, conversation with Johnny Cash and his mother, Carrie. Naturally, we launched on Dan’s birthday.
In the first week alone, we had 4.2 million views on Facebook, nearly 1 million on Instagram, and 323,000 on YouTube.
We were blown away.
Since then, those numbers have continued to grow significantly week after week. Karen and I have been working tirelessly to archive as much of Dan's work as possible and figure out how best to bring these remarkable conversations to new audiences.
And that's really what makes this project so important to all of us. It's about much more than nostalgia. These recordings capture conversations with some of the most influential figures in music, television, and entertainment, often in ways you simply don't see anymore. They're a part of Nashville's broadcasting history and an important piece of entertainment history that deserves to be preserved, shared, and discovered by future generations.
An afternoon coffee with Demetria and a recent trip to the WSMV basement gave us an even better understanding of just how much material is out there and how much work we all have ahead of us.
It's been a true collaborative effort, and I'm grateful to Karen, Demetria, and everyone at WSMV who has helped bring this project to life. There's still a tremendous amount of work to be done, but seeing the response from people who remember watching Miller & Company, along with those discovering it for the first time, has made the effort incredibly rewarding.
And we're just getting started.
You can watch Miller & Company on YouTube, with new episodes dropping every Sunday night at 10:30 PM, a tribute to the show's original time slot.
Alternatively, you can follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
So far, we've shared episodes featuring Johnny and Carrie Cash, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Reed, Willie Nelson, The Fairfield Four and Canadian Brass, Grandpa Jones, and Bill Monroe, with many more to come.
