Book Review: Jack Daniel’s Legacy

By Richard Thomas

Rating: B

Decades before anyone was writing books about whiskey, Jack Daniel’s had grown into a cultural phenomenon that placed it somewhat outside the larger whiskey industry, both at home and abroad. In the late 1960s, Tennessee Whiskey was not the stodgy, blue collar drink that was already being rejected by the Baby Boomer generation. It’s place in popular culture had grown far beyond its initial associations with Frank Sinatra; the iconic squared bottle and black label had been embraced by rock and rollers, artists and other famous figures, and the whiskey with a rough-edged interpretation of freedom.

So it was in 1967 when reporter Ben A. Green published his biography of Jack Daniel, Jack Daniel Legacy. The mid-20th Century was not a time for whiskey books, and not at all for the people who made it. There were a few books about Scotch published between 1950 and 1970, but that was about it. That a publisher took a chance on a biography about the namesake of the popular whiskey brand, the Pappy Van Winkle of its era, says a lot about the place that brand was taking in the American cultural firmament.

The book grew out of conversations Green had with Thomas Gregory Motlow, who would die just two years after the publication at age 91. Thomas Motlow was the nephew of Jack Daniel and brother of Daniel’s successor, Lem Motlow. Knowing that makes me think Green had a lost opportunity, because Lem Motlow died in 1947 and a biography of him would have made a wonderful second volume of work for us modern folks, especially in the context of being just a decade removed from Brown-Forman’s acquisition of the company in 1956. As it was, Green’s biography became the origin of much of the popular folklore surrounding Daniel, and was required reading for Brown-Forman executives into the 21st Century.

The most recent printing was a 50th anniversary edition, published in 2017 with a new foreward from Fawn Weaver, who had just embarked on what would turn out to not be a biography of Jack Daniel’s slave mentor Nathan Green but really a memoir of her writing of a memoir while starting a whiskey company. Proceeds went to the Nearest Green Foundation, which continues to support scholarships and memorials to Green, although this biography no longer contributes as it is out of print again. Readers can only acquire used copies.

When reading Jack Daniel’s Legacy, one needs to recall its two major limitations: it’s a work of mid-Century Southern popular history and it was a first pass not only on its own subject, but in its specific genres of whiskey biography and American whiskey non-fiction. Later works would focus on parsing out the conflicting evidence of folklore surrounding Daniel and zero in on what the records and physical evidence told us, correcting the record. Green also writes in a folksy style that, while popular with writers in the region at the time, has long since fallen out of favor.

Despite those limitations, however, this is a book that should be of interest to reading whiskey enthusiasts generally, and because of the place it holds. If one sees it on a store shelf, that store will undoubtedly be a used book store, and acquiring a copy will prove relatively cheap. There really is no excuse not to have it, just to have a whiskey biography that really stood alone in its day. Even today, it remains one of only two biographies ever written about Daniel.