This weekend, as you raise a glass of that purely American distilled spirit, Jack Daniel’s, to the founding of our fair country, you should be aware — at least according to New York Daily News columnist Shaun King — that you’re committing the deep sin of cultural appropriation.
That’s right: King says that Jack Daniel’s, a multi-million dollar distilling company based in Tennessee and famous for its home-grown bourbon, amassed its whiskey-related fortune on the back of slave labor. According to King, Jack Daniel’s founder George Garvin Brown (and, according to lore Jack Daniel himself) learned how to distill while working with a preacher named Dan Call and his “Master Distiller,” an enslaved black man named Nearis Green.
King claims that the Jack Daniel’s company has glossed over Green’s status, and that they’ve essentially “stolen” their product from a slave who learned the trade in Africa, and based the recipe used for Jack Daniel’s on an old African mixture. King claims that Jack Daniel’s has long tried to hide their true history, especially as the distiller turns 150 years old.
But King would be wrong on two counts. One, Jack Daniel’s is using their 150th anniversary to acknowledge Green’s role in Jack Daniel’s founding. In a New York Times piece — which King himself links to — the company acknowledges that it scrubbed Green from its history and that it’s trying to make up for it.
They say that the version of the story with Green was “never a secret” but that they explicitly want to embrace Green to head off social justice concerns over their product, and to rectify how Green was treated as Jack Daniel’s grew in popularity in the Jim Crow south. They acknowledge that it’s a process — changing years of history without looking like they’re doing it as a selling point — and want to incorporate Green’s contributions in a realistic and tasteful way (lest people like Shaun King accuse them of pandering, of course).
Second, while Jack Daniel’s “Lincoln County” distilling method, where distilled moonshine is passed through layers of charcoal to mellow the taste, is unique to the Americas, distilling liquor to make whiskey is hardly a practice limited to a single country or region.
According to Wikipedia, distilled alcohols made their first appearance around the first century A.D. in Greece. Medieval Arabs perfected the process, and just about ever country on Earth has some history with a distilled liquor (Scotland, of course, claims the crown).
Traces of Scottish, English, and German methods end up in American distilling. There is some question as to where Jack Daniel’s got the idea to run its distilled spirits through charcoal — and it may have been from a process used by enslaved Africans who made their own distilled alcohol, then ran it through charcoal filters to moderate the moonshine-y sting.
That hardly makes Jack Daniel’s entire process — or the whole of American distilling — an act of cultural appropriation. If anything, it’s a uniquely American improvement on the global initiative to use whatever you have available to get wasted.