ABOUT ICON ENTERTAINMENT & HOSPITALITY

Founded by celebrated entrepreneur and real estate investor Bill Miller, Icon Entertainment & Hospitality is a real estate development and hospitality company that owns and operates some of the most popular establishments in Nashville – including the Johnny Cash Museum, Sinatra Bar & Lounge, Patsy Cline Museum, Nudie’s Honky Tonk, House of Cards, Johnny Cash’s Bar & BBQ and Skull’s Rainbow Room – as well as the Southern Turf Lofts and Music City Threads merchandise line. Icon’s newest ventures include the Southern Turf Club and East Nashville neighborhood bar Schulman’s. Since opening the Johnny Cash Museum in 2013 – the first component of a presence in downtown Nashville that is now comprised of more than 100,000 square feet of commercial real estate – Icon has welcomed millions of patrons from around the world to its dining and entertainment establishments. USA Today, Forbes, Time, Rolling Stone, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, Southern Living, Marie Claire, AAA and TripAdvisor are just a few of the outlets and organizations that have honored and awarded Icon’s establishments with distinction, solidifying their status as “must-visit” Music City attractions and dining experiences.

For more information visit iconentertainment.com

ABOUT BILL MILLER

Bill Miller’s passion for music and history combined with his longtime friendship with the legendary Johnny Cash set the foundation for his ascension to one of Nashville’s most successful and visionary entrepreneurs. 

Now the owner of six buildings that total more than 100,000 square feet of commercial real estate, it is the California native’s potent combination of intuition and acumen that fuel such thriving Nashville ventures as the Johnny Cash Museum, the Patsy Cline Museum, Nudie’s Honky Tonk, House of Cards (a unique upscale eatery featuring live magic), Johnny Cash’s Bar & BBQ, the Music City Threads merchandise line and, most recently, Sinatra Bar & Lounge, which shares a home with Miller’s popular nightspot Skull’s Rainbow Room in the landmark Southern Turf building. 

Since the 2013 opening of the Johnny Cash Museum (named the country’s Best Music Museum in the 2023 USA Today/10Best Readers’ Choice Travel Awards), Miller’s real estate development and hospitality company Icon Entertainment Group has welcomed millions of patrons from around the world to its establishments. Numerous outlets and organizations – including Forbes, Time, Rolling Stone, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, Southern Living, Marie Claire, AAA and TripAdvisor – have honored and awarded those establishments with distinction, solidifying their status as “must-visit” Music City attractions and dining experiences. 

“If I looked back and somebody had told me, you’re going to own numerous bars, restaurants and museums in downtown Nashville, I literally would have laughed because it’s nothing that we’ve had any training to do. It’s simply been shooting from the hip and creating compelling concepts,” says Miller, who currently calls Music City home. 

Indeed, Miller has come a long way from his rural California roots, where he founded a real estate company and served three terms as mayor of his hometown before launching the Odyssey Group. One of the largest dealers of historical documents and memorabilia in the country, the Odyssey Group sold everything from handwritten letters by George Washington to George Harrison’s Telecaster, and helped establish Miller as the noted and highly-respected authority on such documents and celebrity memorabilia that he is today. 

Miller’s business endeavors have traversed through a variety of clientele – including Dolly Parton, The White House, Graceland, The Country Music Hall of Fame (he appraised and authenticated every single item in the Hall of Fame collection), Marty Stuart, President Gerald Ford, the Estates of Minnie Pearl and Hank Snow to name just a few – while he drew on his preservation and musical history passions to author the critically-acclaimed Cash: An American Man, which Larry King hailed as “the best celebrity biography coffee table book ever done.”

Ultimately, It was his friendship with Cash that led him to Nashville, where his agenda now includes adding luxury lofts and a members-only club to the Southern Turf building and opening a neighborhood bar in East Nashville’s historic Southern Grist building.  

“I’m so grateful and feel so blessed because I don’t think I could have a better life than I do and it has to do with family and being able to expose people to experiences that are really fun and compelling,” Miller says. “I believe in destiny. I believe in God. I believe in God’s plan and unbeknownst to me, I think God’s plan was to have us do this.”

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