By Richard Thomas
Rating: B+
When I embarked on my own recent project to author a book about Jack Daniel’s Distillery, I was keenly aware that no such book on that subject had been written and only two biographies of Mr. Jack himself had ever been published. The former is Jack Daniel’s Legacy, first published in 1968 and most recently re-released in 2017, but very much out of date and out of print. The most recent effort is Peter Krass’s Blood and Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel’s, published in 2004. So, when I got started it had been 20 years since even the legendary Mr. Jack had gotten any literary attention.
Krass’s work is modern, taking sources more professionally and producing cleaner prose than Green’s earlier work. That is not to say it is entirely free of being trying to sound overtly Southern, because at times Krass writes things in a way as if to announce that he is a hot-blooded partisan of the South and nursing grievances against Yankees generally. But the book is a work of the early 21st Century, free of the folksy prose so many popular Southern historiographers of the mid-20th Century used, a style I sometimes find more of a headache to read than German, Portuguese or Old English. Krass also makes a serious approach at sorting out the fact from fiction, relying as much as possible on records and physical sources over folklore and recollection.
The main drawback of the book, in fact, is one that should be in common with a biography of any person whose primary occupation was the whiskey business: there isn’t that much to write. At the end of the day, books of this nature are going to be short, either because the gaps in the story or wide or there just is not that much to say about it. Clay Shwab’s recent book about his ancestor Manny Shwab, for example, was able to thicken itself up by delving into Nashville politics, a very relevant contextualization given the subject. I felt the most logical course for a biography of Jack Daniel would be to explore just how Mr. Jack was actually making whiskey at the time, even if doing so would have required expert speculation. The idea either never occurred to Krass or he lacked the means to actualize it, so instead he takes his contextualization too far. The middle-to-late parts of the book are almost as much about the national politics of the whiskey business in its era, in which Jack Daniel was essentially a non-entity, as it is about Daniel himself.
Basically, I suspect Krass had to reach of a lot of filler to make his word count, and he was not especially imaginative about how he went about it.
Leaving that criticism aside, this is still a good biography. More importantly, it’s the only modern biography of Jack Daniel available. If that is a subject of interest to you, this is the only place to go.
