A lengthy New York Times piece details the likely influence that a slave named Nearis Green had on the whiskey’s original recipe.
In startup culture, founding stories often have the power to inspire venture capitalists to pump millions into those businesses.
However, a 150-year-old company’s story has probably been told and altered over time to create a favorable picture. Such is the case with Jack Daniel’s, whose founding story boiled down to Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel learning how to make whiskey from a moonshine distiller named Dan Call.
The real story—one that Jack Daniel’s is now embracing in its marketing and social media efforts—is that it wasn’t Call, but rather Green, one of Call’s slaves, who helped Daniel get started in the distillery business.
“It's taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves,” Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniel's in-house historian, told The New York Times.
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Phil Epps, global brand director for Jack Daniel’s at its parent company, Brown-Forman, told The Times that it was never “a conscious decision” to remove Green from the company’s founding narrative, but the more he and his colleagues dug into the story, they more they realized it was “something that we could be proud of.”
The story has opened up a broader conversation about how the contributions of African-American slaves is perceived and recounted in contemporary culture.
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