Uncle Nearest: The Former Slave Who Taught Jack Daniels How to Make Whiskey

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And we've heard from Fawn Weaver on our show before.
She told us her story of growing up the daughter

(00:31):
of Motown Royalty, realizing that she didn't fit in wherever
she was, and then realizing that wasn't such a bad thing.
You've also heard the story of Uncle Nearest Whiskey, the
Tennessee whiskey brand Fawn founded, named after the African American
man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. And

(00:52):
now we're about to tell you the story of how
Fawn came upon Nearest story. And it all began with
some troubles she was with a business he'd invested in.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
After a frustrating, a frustrating time with the founders that
I was backing, really really really frustrating, we could not
see eye to eye on how business should be done
and how people should be treated. And after really frustrating time,
I decided I was going to do something that I

(01:27):
almost never did, which is I went on vacation. And
my husband is an executive vice president, one of the
executive vice presidents at Sony Pictures, and he also sits
on the board for the Motion Picture Association of America.
Their Asian I think it was their Asian Council, was

(01:47):
having a meeting in Singapore, and at the very last minute,
I said, you know what, babe, I'm going to come
with you on that trip.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
I know it's a work trip for you, but I just.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Want to get away from what is going on. And
we got to the hotel. In the morning, we were
in the hotel lounge and I opened up the New
York Times International Audition, and on the cover of the
New York Times International Addition was the headline, Jack Daniel

(02:18):
embraces a secret.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
Ingredient help from a slave.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
And beneath that was a picture of Jack Daniel and
his entire crew, and right next to him to his
right was an African American man.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
And the thing that a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Miss with that photo, but it's what drew me into
that photo is Jack Daniel was the big guy in
the photo. It was his company, this was his crew,
but he seeded the center position of the photo to
an African American man, and at the time, no one
knew who that African American man was. And so I,

(02:59):
you know, having five days with nothing to do, I
decided to start diving in and digging in. And it's
something this actually isn't something that's new for me. I've
never taken it this far where I dove into the
rabbit hole and never came back out. But it's something
that I enjoy doing on the Sabbath. So my husband
and I observe the Sabbath twenty four hours a week.

(03:22):
We do nothing work related. And so what I like
to do on my Sabbath and I have for decades,
is I go into my research rabbit hole.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
I'll find a topic.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
It could be something that pops up in my news feed,
it could be something that I heard about earlier in
the week while I was working and just didn't pause
to dig into it, and I'll go back to it
on the Sabbath. And so I had literally five days
to do nothing but to research this story of this

(03:52):
African American man. And so I start digging into this story.
And the thing that was I is, is we read
the story that morning. We were both absolutely blown away
that there was this thought that there was an African
American man that may have been at the beginning, at

(04:12):
the start, at the founding of this iconic American brand.
If you go around the world, there are very few
brands that would be considered iconic American. I mean even
if you go with Jim Beam, for instance, who dates
back to a similar date, but the company is now
owned by Japanese and so when you're talking about iconic

(04:35):
American brands, there's few things that say that quite like
Jack Daniels. And so to see this African American the
picture the center position being seeded to this man, and
nobody knew who he was. They it was said that
they believed it was a man named near Screen, but
they didn't know. And then I went and I googled

(04:55):
the name near Screen, which they had misspelled at the time,
which we done the research, and the spelling was definitely
incorrect at that time.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
But we googled, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Near Screen, and nothing came up except for this New
York Times piece and then a regurgitation of the piece,
which is to say that every newspaper around the world
was reprinting some of them not giving credit, some of
them giving credit, but it was the exact same.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Story over and over and over and over again. And
so I thought, this is insane.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
How do you have this African American man at the
center of this iconic American brand and nobody has any
information on him? And so I did tried to do digging,
but literally nothing came up. And then I went back,
maybe about four hours later, and to see did I

(05:53):
miss something the first time around? And then a Wikipedia
page it popped up. Now, the Wikipedia page didn't exist before.
There wasn't a whole lot on it, that wasn't a
part of the New York Times piece. But it did
reference a book called Jack Daniels Legacy. So I ordered
Jack Daniel's Legacy and had it sent to my home.

(06:14):
I ordered it on Amazon, had it sent to my home,
and I did whatever research I could do from the
hotel room. But it really only lasted about a day
or so because after that there was nothing. It was
the Wikipedia page, it was the New York Times piece,
and that was it. So I figured, well, when I
get home, I'll read the book. It will probably not

(06:36):
reference him by name, it'll probably refer to a colored
man or a enslaved man, or a slave or a
Negro or That was my thought process of how it
would be spoken about in the book because that's what
is common. And so my thought was they're probably just
putting two and two together that this African American man

(06:59):
is the same person that was in Jack Daniel's legacy,
even though he's not mentioned by name.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
So that was my thought process.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
So I ordered the book, but I certainly wasn't expecting
much from the book itself.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
And when we come back, we'll hear more from Fawn
Weaver the story of Uncle Nearest. After these messages, this
is our American Stories. Here are our American Stories. We
bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love.

(07:34):
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
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we do, please go to our American Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our

(07:54):
American Stories dot Com. And we're back with our American
Stories and the story of how Fawn Weaver discovered the
story of the African American man who taught Jack Daniel

(08:18):
how to make whiskey, Nathan Uncle Nearest green. While in Singapore,
Fawn read a New York Times article had talked about
Uncle Nearest but didn't say much about who he was.
When we last left off, she had had the biography
of Jack Daniels sent to her home in the States
while she was halfway around the world. Let's return to
Fawn's story.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
And then a few days later we finished in Singapore
and we went on what was meant to be a
two day just kind of an add on vacation to
I believe it was Kuala Lumpur, and we went there,
we checked into the hotel, we had a beautiful day,
and then the next day we went to a spa.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
And we're not big spa people.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
It's not really what we do, but every now and
again we'll go on vacation. And so Keith wasn't participating.
I went into the spa and did a massage.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
And I think a facial or something.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
And when I come out, I'm expecting to go back
to go just pay for it and then or charge
it to the room and then go back to the room.
But I come out and Keith is in the lobby.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
And to know my.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Husband is to know he loves me so much, but
he would not be sitting in the lobby of a
spa unless there was something that was needed. And so
he looks at me, and I walk over to him,
and I could see concern in his eye, and so
I walk over and he takes my hand and he says, Babe,

(09:57):
we need to pray.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
Come sit with me. And so we sit and I said,
what are we praying about?

Speaker 2 (10:04):
And he said, Brittany has been in a motorcycle accident
and it doesn't look good.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Now.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Brittany is my niece who is as much a daughter
as she was my niece. We don't have any children,
we've not been able to have children, and we've been
now moving into our seventeenth year of marriage, and so
she is very much so that baby girl. I was
there from the very beginning. I was telling someone the

(10:32):
other day that she was so funny as a little
girl because anytime I would go to the restroom, she'd
follow me into the restroom. And I don't know what
the fact and I go, Brittany, can I just go
to the bathroom, and she say sure, but she'd never leave.
I don't know if it was me going into another
room and she not being able to see me.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
I don't know what it was, but she is just
my baby girl.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
And so when he said it, I immediately and to cry,
and we tried to pray for about a second, and
I said, I can't, I can't give me give me
your phone, and I looked at the text that my
sister sent and I responded to the text, and I said,

(11:18):
tell Brittany that she cannot leave me, whisper in her
ear that I am on my way. She cannot leave me.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
I will be right there. She has to hang on.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
And my sister texted me back within thirty seconds and said,
I'm sorry, Sis, she's gone.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
A driver.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Hit her head on and they were turning and the
sun was blocking was glaring on the glass, and the
driver never saw my niece and floored it.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
While making a left, so she had she had not
a chance.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
And my world absolutely shattered, and so we both cried
quite a bit to a place where the people in
the spa. The manager of the spot came over because
obviously we were disturbing what is otherwise a very peaceful

(12:21):
experience for people, and we recognized that. So we went
outside and just, I mean, we could not get ourselves together.
And finally we were able to pull it together enough
to be able to walk back into our hotel room
and got to our hotel room and again just absolutely
lost it. And I probably say, I don't know, you

(12:43):
know how you cry until there's literally no more tears left.
You see this in kids, in kids where they'll just
pour down tears and tears and then they're still yelling,
but there's no tears coming down because they've literally cried
all the tears out. And that that happened to Keith
and I and Keith he turns to me and he says,

(13:07):
what would Brittany have us do in this moment? And
britt had just been at our house a couple weeks before,
she had just celebrated her birthday, and she was at
our home. And I don't believe in regrets.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
I do believe in lessons.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
And it was a huge lesson for me because as
she sat in the kitchen with my husband for hours
talking about me, and I listened to her say, Fawn
has always been a mom to me. And to tell
him different stories of different things and ways I've impacted
her life. And meanwhile I'm responding to emails and doing

(13:49):
what you know is important, if you will.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
And she left that night on her motorcycle.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
But earlier in the afternoon, we had been all been
hanging out and having don Julio nineteen forty two, and
so he turns to me and he said, what would
Britney have us do? And I said She'd have us
go raise a glass of nineteen forty two.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
And so we.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Left out of the room to go to the hotel
bar to try.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
To find nineteen forty two.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And on our way out, we were passing through the
outside area where there's a pool, and I remember Keith
walking on a step before me and I being on
the step right above, and we had to pause momentarily
because hundreds of white butterflies began circling the lower portion

(14:47):
of our legs. We literally could not move because they
were just circling. I've never seen that before, I've never
seen it since. And they circled us for a couple
of minutes and then took off, and we looked at
each other and said.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
Brittany has just ascended.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
And we went to the hotel bar we had our
nineteen forty two. We cried some more, and we got
on a plane five o'clock the next morning, first the
first plane that was out going out, and we arrived back.
And as soon as I get back to Los Angeles,
I go into full party planning mode. I knew Brittany

(15:32):
would not want a funeral. She would want for people
to feel as though her homegoing ceremony was the best
time that they've had. She would want people to enjoy it.
It was what Brittany would have loved. And so for
two weeks straight, I poured myself into planning every piece
of this party with her mom and her dad and

(15:56):
my siblings. And after it was over for we go
back home, and now I have to actually deal with
the fact that she was gone for two weeks. I
didn't have to deal with it because I was in
party planning mode.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
And we get back home and.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
I pick up a package that is on my desk
and it's an Amazon package. Now, Keith will tell you
there were twenty Amazon packages on my desk, but the
package I'm referring to was Jack Daniel's Legacy, and I
open it up, and I go to the living room.

(16:35):
I sit in the living room, and at the time,
our living room, like it does here in Tennessee, it
had floor to stealing windows. And I remember starting to
read this book and expecting not much. I mean again,

(16:55):
maybe for it to mention a negro or a black
person or a slave, but never for it to actually
say Nearest Green.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
And very early on in.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
The pages, Jack Daniel, as a young boy, is introduced
to what the book refers to as a coal black Negro,
and he's introduced to him by a person that they
are both working for. Nearest Green was a rented slave
on this man's property, and Jack Daniel had come to
work as a chore boy.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
And you're listening to Fawn Weaver and the connections in
her life, the loss of her beloved Brittany, and how
that served as a pivot point in her life. She's
drawing down on this book she's been waiting to read.
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Fawn
Weaver's story discovering Uncle Nearest here on our American Stories,

(18:08):
And we're back with our American Stories and the conclusion
of Fawn Weavers's story on how she discovered Nathan Nearest
Green story, the African American man who taught Jack Daniel
how to make whiskey. After losing her niece, Fawn needed
to decompress and decided to do so with Jack Daniel's biography.

Speaker 3 (18:30):
So Jack is for you know, those who do not know.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Jack was the tenth child and his mother died when
he was four months old, so he was wet nursed
by the neighbor. He was a little kid, a runt
if you will. He never grew to be more than
five foot two, even as an adult, and so if
you think about him as.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
A kid, he's not a great farm hand.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
He moved to that property when he was somewhere between
seven than an eight years old and eight years old
as a chore boy, and that means anything from going
to get water from the well for the family, milking cows,
feeding the hogs, you know, whatever you had to do,

(19:16):
dealing with the slop.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
It was not glamorous in the least bit.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
But the book says that he was fascinated by whatever
was going on on this property where you had the
mules and wagons shuffling in and out of there, but
no one would ever take him to go see what
was happening on the other side of the property.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
And the reason is the person.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Who they were both working for, both Nears Green and
Jack Daniel was a preacher and a distiller, and he
married a teetotaler, and he had a church on his property.
So three hundred and thirty eight acres on one end
of the property was his home. On another end of
the property was his church, and on another end of
the property, if you're looking at it as a triangle,

(19:58):
was his distillery. So he kept his three world separate,
his family, his distillery, and his church, and his family
and his church. Basically issued an ultimatum, and so Dan
Call decided that he was going to leave the distillery business.
But the distillery never stopped operating on his property, and
it never stopped operating under a man by the name

(20:20):
of Near Screen. So in the book, Jack Daniel is
introduced to this coal black negro by the preacher saying
he is the best whiskey maker I know of. Now
in this book, the reason why that's important is he
says verbatim, this is uncle Nerist. He is the best

(20:43):
whiskey maker I know of. It's important because there were
sixteen other distilleries in a four mile radius. So the
question became, why was he the best and why did
the preacher want for him to teach Jack everything he
knew about his way of making whiskey, And it was

(21:04):
because the way that Nears Green made whiskey was what
we now know as Tennessee whiskey.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
But I'm sitting in my home in.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Los Angeles reading this, and from the very early portion
of the book, you see over and over again Nears Green,
uncle nerris Eli Green, which was his son, George Green,
which was another son. You see them mentioned over and
over and over and over again, and a biography that
is not that big, and nears and his boys are

(21:36):
mentioned more times than Jack's own family. So I'm reading
this and I am falling in love with two characters,
which was completely unexpected for me. I'm falling in love
with the uncle nearest character, but also the Jack Daniel
character and who they both were and what they represented

(21:58):
in this remarkable time. So I'm sitting on my couch
and just completely engrossed in this story. And You've got
to remember that not only have I just lost my
niece and just my world is wrecked, but This is
now happening in July of twenty and sixteen, So if

(22:21):
you remember what was happening at that time, our country
was being.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Divided by race.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
We had a political both sides of the aisle, both
Republicans and Democrats were using race as a wedge, and
not very many people had hope at that moment. And
I was looking for hope in terms of trying to
escape what I was dealing with and grieving for my niece.

(22:50):
But in this book, I'm finding a different kind of
hope because of the situation we're in in America at
that time. So I'm reading this and I remember telling
my husband when he walked in. I said, Pabe, I
really like this guy. And he's like who, And I
said Jack Daniel.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
And he was so confused by this because I didn't
know what I was reading.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
And so I started telling him about the book and
the fact that Nearss has mentioned over and over and
over and over again. And I remember when I looked
up from the book at that moment, I remember right
in front of me, where the window was seeing a
white butterfly, a single white butterfly, just kind of fluttering
back and forth, back and forth, and it took me

(23:37):
back to those white butterflies that circled our legs, and
I remember looking at that and saying, hey, brit but
not thinking very much of it.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Again, this is I think.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
When you lose someone, you begin looking for hope in
any and everything. And I remember looking and saying hey,
Brit and going back to reading and just loving this story.
And I got so engrossed in the book. It's not
that long of a book, but I got so engrossed
in the book, and because I think still trying to escape.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Trying to look for hope.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
And I remember taking the book with me in the
kitchen and still kind of reading while I was I
didn't know what I was doing, maybe making tea or something,
but I'm still reading and doing something else. And I
look up and in the window is a single white
butterfly going back.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
And forth, back and forth.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
And I go into my office a little later in
the day, I picked the book back up, I start
reading it some more, and here comes that white butterfly again,
and I began to associate the white butterfly with my niece,
and I began to associate the niece with this book,
and my love for this book and this story became

(24:48):
interwoven with my love for my niece. And I can't
explain it other than to say I had to tell
the story of Nears Green and Jack Daniel in a
way that I believed the story was lived and I

(25:10):
believed my niece was directing it from heaven.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
It's the only way that I can explain it.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
And as crazy as it sounds, because if we go back,
we're talking about a brand, right that. Normally, when you're
talking about a whiskey brand, you're not talking about butterflies
in heaven and you. But that is what that is,
what was the origin of my interests. I can tell
you that I had absolutely no plans to go in

(25:38):
the whisky business. I am a child of two teetotalers.
The last place I would have been putting my money
was whiskey. And yet I began looking at the story
and diving into the story and.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Wanting to know more and more and more and more.
And the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
And it became very clear to me that the only
way I was going to really learn as much about
the story as I felt like my heart was being
pooled to learn was to actually travel to Lynchburg, Tennessee
to interview the descendant. The only descendant that that New
York Times article had referenced, a man by the name
of Claude d at the time was ninety one years old,

(26:23):
and so I set my heart on going to interview him,
and had decided what I wanted to do for my
fortieth birthday was to research the story of Narscreen. On
the outside looking in, it would make no sense to
me whatsoever, being in it, it made all the sense
in the world because that book and that story was

(26:45):
providing me hope that I needed in that moment, and
I didn't want it to stop.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
And that hope, well, it led fond Weaver down a
wild path, from buying the house at the dan Call
Farm to meeting with her sentence, who told her that
the best way to honor Nearest's memory was a bottle
with nearest name on it. And by the way, that
bottle has been the most awarded New American whiskey in

(27:13):
American history. Von Weaver's story, Uncle Nearest story and the
Jack Daniels story here on our American Stories