General Discussion

eridani

(51,907 posts) Mon Jul 4, 2016, 09:36 PM Jul 2016

Jack Daniels' Secret History Shows the Recipe Was Actually Developed by a Black Slave

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37771-jack-daniels-secret-history-shows-the-recipe-was-actually-developed-by-a-black-slave

No story is more truly and deeply American than the story of Jack Daniels whiskey and the Brown family. By truly and deeply I mean that the company, a century-and-a-half after its founding, is now publicly admitting that the down-home story they've always told about George Garvin Brown learning how to make the whiskey from an old white preacher named Dan Call is a lie.

George Garvin Brown learned to make whiskey from a black man named Nearis Green. Nearis Green, a highly skilled distiller, was also an enslaved American owned by Dan Call.

So, please allow me to reframe the story of Jack Daniels whiskey a bit.

A white Christian preacher in Lynchburg, Tenn., "owned" people. One of those people he "owned" was Nearis Green, a black man who was a skilled distiller of liquor. That black man, a slave, taught George Garvin Brown how to make whiskey. The recipe and methods were deeply African.

For 150 years the story of how this whiskey came to be, who taught George Garvin Brown how to make it, and why it succeeded, though, was as white and Eurocentric as a story could be.

Even as late as last year, Jack Daniels was distributing carefully crafted infographics on the founding of the company — that never mention a single word about Nearis Green. Hundreds of thousands of people per year have been touring the Jack Daniels museum without a single mention of Nearis Green — not because his contribution was only recently discovered, but because the reality and truth of the company is far more complex and messy than they've ever really wanted to admit.