October 5, 2023 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, at a time when she needed it most, Fawn Weaver happened upon the story of Uncle Nathan "Nearest" Green, the former slave who taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey.
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Episode Transcript
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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.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And we've heard from Fawn Weaver on our show before.
She told us her story of growing up the daughter
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
(00:48):
man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. And
now we're about to tell you the story of how
Fawn came upon Nearest story. And it all began with
some trouble she was having with a business he'd invested in.
Speaker 3 (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. I know it's a work
trip for you, but I just 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
(02:09):
on the cover of the New York Times International Addition
was the headline Jack Daniel embraces a secret ingredient help
from a slave. 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. And
(02:34):
the thing that a lot of people 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
(02:54):
American man was. And so I, 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
(03:17):
on the Sabbath. So my husband and I observe the
Sabbath twenty four hours a week. 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. I'll find a topic. It could be
something that pops up in my news feed, it could
be something that I heard about earlier in the week
(03:37):
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 African American man.
And so I start digging into this story. And the
(03:59):
thing that was I ironic 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 the Starart,
at the founding of this iconic American brand. If you
go around the world, there are very few brands that
(04:22):
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 American brands, there's
few things that say that quite like Jack Daniels. And
so to see this African American the picture the center
(04:44):
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 the name near Screen,
which they had misspelled at the time, which now done
the research and the spelling was definitely incorrect at that time.
(05:05):
But we googled, you know, 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 story over and over and over
(05:27):
and over again. And so I thought, this is insane.
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,
(05:48):
maybe about four hours later, and to see did I
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
(06:10):
Jack Daniel's Legacy and had it sent to my home.
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,
(06:31):
and that was it. So I figured, well, when I
get home, I'll read the book. It will probably not
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.
(06:54):
And so my thought was they're probably just putting two
and two together that this African American man is the
same person that was in Jack Daniel's legacy, even though
he's not mentioned by name. So that was my thought process.
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 Fawnweaver
the story of Uncle Nearest. After these messages, this is
our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Here are our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told. But we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:50):
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we're back with
our American Stories and the story of how Fawn Weaver
(08:13):
discovered the story of the African American man who taught
Jack Daniel how to make whiskey, Nathan Uncle Nearest green.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
While in Singapore, Fawn read a.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
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 3 (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. We went there, we
checked into the hotel, we had a beautiful day, and
(09:05):
then the next day we went to a spa. And
we're not big spa people. 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 and I think a facial or something.
And when I come out, I'm expecting to go back
to go just pay for it and then or charge
(09:27):
it to the room and then go back to the room.
But I come out and Keith is in the lobby.
And to know my 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
(09:48):
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, we need to pray.
Come sit with me. And so we sit and I said,
what are we praying about? And he said, Brittany has
been in a motorcycle accident and it doesn't look good. Now.
(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, I
don't know what it was, but she is just my
(10:56):
baby girl. And so when he said it, I immediately
began 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,
(11:17):
and I said, tell Brittany that she cannot leave me,
whisper in her ear that I am on my way.
She cannot leave me. I will be right there. She
has to hang on. And my sister texted me back
within thirty seconds and said, I'm sorry, Sis, she's gone.
(11:41):
A driver 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
while making a left, so she had she had not
a chance ants and my world absolutely shattered, and so
(12:08):
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 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
(12:32):
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 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
(12:53):
and then they're still yelling, but there's no tears coming
down because they've literally cried all the tears out. And
that happened to Keith and I and Keith he turns
to me and he says, what would Brittany have us
do in this moment? And britt had just been at
our house a couple of weeks before, she had just
(13:15):
celebrated her birthday, and she was at our home. And
I don't believe in regrets. I do believe in lessons.
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
(13:38):
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
what you know is important, if you will. And she
left that night on her motorcycle. But earlier in the afternoon,
(14:00):
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. And so we left out of the
room to go to the hotel bar to try to
(14:22):
find nineteen forty two. 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
(14:45):
circling the lower portion 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, Brittany has
just ascended, and we went to the hotel bar we
(15:12):
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 would not want a funeral. She would
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
her dad and my siblings. And after it was over,
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. And we get back home and
I pick up a package that is on my desk
(16:19):
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.
I sit on the living room and at the time,
our living room, like it does here in Tennessee, it
(16:40):
had floor to stealing windows. And I remember starting to
read this book and expecting not much. I mean again,
maybe for it to mention a negro or a black
person or a slave, but never for it to actually
(17:03):
say Nearest Green. And very early on in 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
(17:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
In her life.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
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.
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
(18:51):
you think about him as a kid, he's not a
great farm hand. He moved to that property when he
was somewhere between seven and 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
(19:15):
to do, dealing with the slop. It was not glamorous
in the least bit. 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. And the reason is the person who
(19:36):
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 nearest, 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. But I'm sitting in
my home in Los Angeles reading this, and from the
very early portion of the book you see over and
over again Nears Green, uncle nerst Eli Green, which was
his son, George Green, which was another son. You see
(21:26):
them mentioned over and over and over and over again,
and a biography that is not that big, and nears
and his boys are mentioned more times than Jack's own family.
So I'm reading this and I am falling in love
(21:47):
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 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
(22:10):
just lost my niece and just my world is wrecked.
But this is now happening in July of twenty and sixteen.
So if you remember what was happening at that time,
our country was being divided by race. We had a
political both sides of the aisle, both Republicans and Democrats
(22:33):
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. But in
this book, I'm finding a different kind of hope because
(22:55):
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, Babe, I really like
this guy. And he's like who, And I said Jack Daniel.
And he was so confused by because he didn't know
what I was reading. And so I started telling him
(23:17):
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 back to those white butterflies that circled
(23:40):
our legs, and I remember looking at that and saying, hey,
brit but not thinking very much of it. Again, this
is I think, when you lose someone, you begin looking
for hope in any and every thing. 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. And it's not that long of a book,
(24:01):
but I got so engrossed in the book, and because
I think still trying to escape, trying to look for hope.
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 and forth, back and forth. And I
(24:23):
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. It's the
only way that I can explain it. 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
(25:32):
the origin of my interests. I can tell you that
I had absolutely no plans to go in the whiskey 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
(25:53):
the story and wanting to know more and more and
more and more. And the more I learned, the more
I wanted to know. 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 pulled to learn was to actually
travel to Lynchburg, Tennessee to interview the descendant. The only
(26:15):
descendant that that New York Times article had referenced, a
man by the name of Claude E. D at the
time was ninety one years old, 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,
(26:37):
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 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 Fawn Weaver down a
wild path from buying the house at the dan Call
Farm to meeting with their descendants who told her that
the best way to honor Nearest's memory was a bottle
with nearest name on it.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And by the way, that bottle.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Has been the most awarded New American whiskey in American history.
Von Weaver's story, Uncle Nearest's story, and the Jack Daniels
story here on our American Stories
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.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And we've heard from Fawn Weaver on our show before.
She told us her story of growing up the daughter
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
(00:48):
man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. And
now we're about to tell you the story of how
Fawn came upon Nearest story. And it all began with
some trouble she was having with a business he'd invested in.
Speaker 3 (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. I know it's a work
trip for you, but I just 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
(02:09):
on the cover of the New York Times International Addition
was the headline Jack Daniel embraces a secret ingredient help
from a slave. 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. And
(02:34):
the thing that a lot of people 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
(02:54):
American man was. And so I, 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
(03:17):
on the Sabbath. So my husband and I observe the
Sabbath twenty four hours a week. 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. I'll find a topic. It could be
something that pops up in my news feed, it could
be something that I heard about earlier in the week
(03:37):
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 African American man.
And so I start digging into this story. And the
(03:59):
thing that was I ironic 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 the Starart,
at the founding of this iconic American brand. If you
go around the world, there are very few brands that
(04:22):
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 American brands, there's
few things that say that quite like Jack Daniels. And
so to see this African American the picture the center
(04:44):
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 the name near Screen,
which they had misspelled at the time, which now done
the research and the spelling was definitely incorrect at that time.
(05:05):
But we googled, you know, 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 story over and over and over
(05:27):
and over again. And so I thought, this is insane.
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,
(05:48):
maybe about four hours later, and to see did I
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
(06:10):
Jack Daniel's Legacy and had it sent to my home.
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,
(06:31):
and that was it. So I figured, well, when I
get home, I'll read the book. It will probably not
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.
(06:54):
And so my thought was they're probably just putting two
and two together that this African American man is the
same person that was in Jack Daniel's legacy, even though
he's not mentioned by name. So that was my thought process.
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 Fawnweaver
the story of Uncle Nearest. After these messages, this is
our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Here are our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told. But we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
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com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:50):
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we're back with
our American Stories and the story of how Fawn Weaver
(08:13):
discovered the story of the African American man who taught
Jack Daniel how to make whiskey, Nathan Uncle Nearest green.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
While in Singapore, Fawn read a.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
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 3 (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. We went there, we
checked into the hotel, we had a beautiful day, and
(09:05):
then the next day we went to a spa. And
we're not big spa people. 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 and I think a facial or something.
And when I come out, I'm expecting to go back
to go just pay for it and then or charge
(09:27):
it to the room and then go back to the room.
But I come out and Keith is in the lobby.
And to know my 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
(09:48):
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, we need to pray.
Come sit with me. And so we sit and I said,
what are we praying about? And he said, Brittany has
been in a motorcycle accident and it doesn't look good. Now.
(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, I
don't know what it was, but she is just my
(10:56):
baby girl. And so when he said it, I immediately
began 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,
(11:17):
and I said, tell Brittany that she cannot leave me,
whisper in her ear that I am on my way.
She cannot leave me. I will be right there. She
has to hang on. And my sister texted me back
within thirty seconds and said, I'm sorry, Sis, she's gone.
(11:41):
A driver 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
while making a left, so she had she had not
a chance ants and my world absolutely shattered, and so
(12:08):
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 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
(12:32):
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 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
(12:53):
and then they're still yelling, but there's no tears coming
down because they've literally cried all the tears out. And
that happened to Keith and I and Keith he turns
to me and he says, what would Brittany have us
do in this moment? And britt had just been at
our house a couple of weeks before, she had just
(13:15):
celebrated her birthday, and she was at our home. And
I don't believe in regrets. I do believe in lessons.
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
(13:38):
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
what you know is important, if you will. And she
left that night on her motorcycle. But earlier in the afternoon,
(14:00):
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. And so we left out of the
room to go to the hotel bar to try to
(14:22):
find nineteen forty two. 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
(14:45):
circling the lower portion 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, Brittany has
just ascended, and we went to the hotel bar we
(15:12):
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 would not want a funeral. She would
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
her dad and my siblings. And after it was over,
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. And we get back home and
I pick up a package that is on my desk
(16:19):
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.
I sit on the living room and at the time,
our living room, like it does here in Tennessee, it
(16:40):
had floor to stealing windows. And I remember starting to
read this book and expecting not much. I mean again,
maybe for it to mention a negro or a black
person or a slave, but never for it to actually
(17:03):
say Nearest Green. And very early on in 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
(17:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
In her life.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
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.
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
(18:51):
you think about him as a kid, he's not a
great farm hand. He moved to that property when he
was somewhere between seven and 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
(19:15):
to do, dealing with the slop. It was not glamorous
in the least bit. 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. And the reason is the person who
(19:36):
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 nearest, 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. But I'm sitting in
my home in Los Angeles reading this, and from the
very early portion of the book you see over and
over again Nears Green, uncle nerst Eli Green, which was
his son, George Green, which was another son. You see
(21:26):
them mentioned over and over and over and over again,
and a biography that is not that big, and nears
and his boys are mentioned more times than Jack's own family.
So I'm reading this and I am falling in love
(21:47):
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 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
(22:10):
just lost my niece and just my world is wrecked.
But this is now happening in July of twenty and sixteen.
So if you remember what was happening at that time,
our country was being divided by race. We had a
political both sides of the aisle, both Republicans and Democrats
(22:33):
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. But in
this book, I'm finding a different kind of hope because
(22:55):
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, Babe, I really like
this guy. And he's like who, And I said Jack Daniel.
And he was so confused by because he didn't know
what I was reading. And so I started telling him
(23:17):
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 back to those white butterflies that circled
(23:40):
our legs, and I remember looking at that and saying, hey,
brit but not thinking very much of it. Again, this
is I think, when you lose someone, you begin looking
for hope in any and every thing. 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. And it's not that long of a book,
(24:01):
but I got so engrossed in the book, and because
I think still trying to escape, trying to look for hope.
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 and forth, back and forth. And I
(24:23):
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. It's the
only way that I can explain it. 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
(25:32):
the origin of my interests. I can tell you that
I had absolutely no plans to go in the whiskey 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
(25:53):
the story and wanting to know more and more and
more and more. And the more I learned, the more
I wanted to know. 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 pulled to learn was to actually
travel to Lynchburg, Tennessee to interview the descendant. The only
(26:15):
descendant that that New York Times article had referenced, a
man by the name of Claude E. D at the
time was ninety one years old, 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,
(26:37):
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 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 Fawn Weaver down a
wild path from buying the house at the dan Call
Farm to meeting with their descendants who told her that
the best way to honor Nearest's memory was a bottle
with nearest name on it.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And by the way, that bottle.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Has been the most awarded New American whiskey in American history.
Von Weaver's story, Uncle Nearest's story, and the Jack Daniels
story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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