Buddy Miller has recorded music under his own name for the last 30 years, but his influence on roots music stretches far wider. He began playing in the ’70s in Austin, where he met his future wife Julie Griffin when they both were in a band called Partners in Crime. Later, the Buddy Miller Band — which featured a nascent Shawn Colvin — began playing bars in New York City in the 1980s.
He and Julie have made highly acclaimed duo records, too, two of which won Album of the Year honors from the Americana Music Association (AMA). And speaking of the AMA, he’s spent a couple of decades as leader of the house band for the Americana Music Awards show every September in Nashville.
The Buddy & Jim Radio Show, a weekly program he records from his Nashville home studio, has aired on SiriusXM for “let’s say between 13 and 15 years,” Miller guesses. Also from that home studio, he’s produced recordings there for dozens of artists, including Patty Griffin, Allison Moorer, Ralph Stanley, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Solomon Burke. He’s produced or co-produced albums for Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant, even touring extensively with Plant’s Band of Joy and Harris’s backing crew Spyboy.
In the 2010s, Miller began work as executive music producer of the ABC show, Nashville. He signed on in 2012, working alongside T Bone Burnett at first, then taking over the reins himself. He also co-produced several soundtrack albums for the show.
Here at No Depression, when I first wrote about Miller for the fourth issue (Summer 1996), we had a lively discussion of the long road that led to his 1995 Hightone debut Your Love and Other Lies. He and Julie later appeared together on the cover of issue #23 (Sept.-Oct. 1999). And then, when we shuttered the original bimonthly iteration of the magazine in May-June 2008, we put Buddy on the cover and declared him our Artist of the Decade.
Making The Songs Work
“It was very memorable. You know, it’s Dolly Parton in your house.”
