There have only ever been seven Master Distillers overseeing the making of the whiskey, the first one being Jack Daniel himself. For 150 years, credit for teaching the young Jack Daniel how to distil had gone to the Rev Dan Call, a Lutheran preacher in Lynchburg. One history of Jack Daniel's written in 1967 did suggest that Call had instructed the slave to show Daniel how to distil. Jack Daniel died from blood poisoning in 1911 and the company never officially acknowledged the role Green had played. Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniel's in-house historian, said it had "taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves".

Source: New Zealand Herald June 28, 2016 01:23 UTC