Jack Daniel’s is the leading brand of Tennessee whisky, and indeed its iconic black-label bottling is the bestselling American whisky in the world. See whisky, Tennessee. The brand is named after its founder, Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel (1849–1911). Some disagreement exists over his birthdate (the 1849 date was established by author Peter Krass in 2004), but after his father perished in the Civil War, Daniel left home and, it is believed, worked for a local whisky maker named Dan Call. Daniel learned the craft from Call’s newly emancipated African American head distiller, Nathan “Nearest” Green (1820–?) before eventually joining Call as a partner. While author Ben Green described the Nearest Green connection already in 1967, it was only in 2016 that the distillery began sharing the story.
When Daniel and Call started the business is debated; the whisky’s label states 1866 as the founding year of the distillery, but an 1896 article in the Nashville American fixes it as 1874, a 1904 article in Bonfort’s Wine and Spirit Circular gives 1872, and Krass has a starting date of 1875. Daniel—Call succumbed to temperance-movement pressure and sold out in 1882—made sour-mash whisky from local grain and filtered it through charcoal before barreling it, as was popular in Tennessee. See Lincoln County process and sour mash. His “Old No. 7” brand was a regional success in its part of Tennessee (the distillery was originally registered as no. 7 in its district; when the government renumbered it as no. 16, Daniel, resistant to change as always, stuck with the old one). In 1883, Daniel’s distillery was the tenth-largest of the seventy distilleries in its revenue district, making some 400 liters of whisky a day (this was, however, less than a tenth of what the largest, Nelson’s Greenbrier, was making). But Daniel kept expanding the business, all the while sticking to his old-fashioned procedures and his locally grown grain. By the early 1890s, he was distilling three times what he had a decade before. That plus the cattle he raised on the spent mash made him rich.
In 1908, however, his health deteriorating, Daniel passed the business over to his nephew, Lem Motlow (1869–1947), who had been working for him since he was eighteen. Motlow was an ambitious man, and a good businessman. When Tennessee outlawed the production of alcoholic beverages in 1909, he picked up the whole operation and moved it to Missouri, where he ran the operation until national Prohibition came in 1920. But he was also hotheaded, and in 1924 he shot two railroad employees in a drunken rage, wounding the black porter whose attempt to get him to behave had set him off and killing the white conductor who had come to the porter’s aid.
That disgraceful affair, for which he was acquitted by an all-white jury on grounds of self-defense, did not prevent Motlow from getting elected to the Tennessee legislature a few years later, a position he used to tirelessly lobby for the return of distilling to the state, which it had chosen to keep suppressed after Repeal. Finally, he was able to get a state permit in 1938, although Moore County, where the distillery was located, remained—and remains—dry. Once again, Motlow was making sour-mash, charcoal-mellowed whisky, using old-fashioned pot- or three-chamber stills (it appears that this was because the government forced the distillery to shut down during World War II, as it did every distillery that couldn’t make neutral spirit for munitions). See still, three-chamber. Until the war, he also made apple and peach brandies and was probably the last person to legally make the latter until the 2010s. See peach brandy. In 1956, his heirs sold the brand, a relatively small but highly regarded one, to Kentucky’s Brown-Forman company. See Brown-Forman.
Brown-Forman took the brand’s small-town, old-school, “authentic” image and, with canny marketing, turned Jack Daniel’s into the whisky of the counterculture: the rock and roll whisky. To a degree, this image has remained.
Green, Ben. Jack Daniel’s Legacy. Shelbyville, TN: n.p., 1967.
Krass, Peter. Blood and Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
“Lynchburg and Moore County.” Nashville American, March 8, 1896, 18.
“Remorse Grips Distiller Who Killed Conductor.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 19, 1924, 3.
“Tennessee whiskey.” Bonfort’s Wine and Liquor Circular, June 25, 1904, 174.
Doug Frost and David Wondrich
Advertisement for Jack Daniel’s whisky, 1896.
Wondrich Collection.
Advertisement for Jack Daniel’s whisky, 1896. Source: Wondrich Collection.