Jimmy Bedford

James Howard “Jimmy” Bedford was born into a farm family in rural Franklin County, Tennessee, on January 30th, 1940. Jimmy attended and graduated from Moore County High School and then graduated from Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN. Jimmy met his future wife, Emily, while attending Tenn Tech. The newlyweds settled back in Lynchburg after they were married. In 1968, Jimmy was hired by Jack Daniel’s Distillery to supervise the milling, yeasting, fermenting, and distillation processes.

Jimmy was remembered by people who knew him as a quiet, kind man of principles, much more comfortable in smaller, intimate settings than speaking to large audiences and assemblies. One of Jimmy’s gifts of talent was his sense of taste and smell. These are, of course, abilities that are crucial to the whiskey industry. Whiskey must be consistent; the consumer must have the implicit trust that when they purchase a bottle of whiskey, it will taste like the previous bottle that they have grown to love. Jimmy would often “inspect” new batches of whiskey and compare them with the older batches by sipping, but not swallowing. Sampling these “thiefed” samples from the new barrels before mellowing and bottling was to make sure that their whiskey product never changed from batch to batch. Jimmy would often state that he wanted to make sure Old No.7 remained the “biggest constant in Lynchburg”.

After working 20 years at Jack Daniel Distillery, in 1988, Jimmy was honored with the promotion of becoming the 6th Master Distiller in the Jack Daniel Distillery’s storied history. Interestingly, as Jimmy ascended to the esteemed position of Master Distiller, the whiskey industry was beginning to expect more from a Master Distiller of a signature brand of whiskey than simply overseeing the consistency and production of legendary Tennessee Whiskey. So, under Jimmy’s leadership, some extensions of the Jack Daniel whiskey repertoire, namely, Jack Daniel’s “Single Barrel” and “Gentleman Jack,” were introduced to become two of their “super-premium” brands.

The shy, introverted Bedford was also soon called upon to become the “face” of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in another role: its Brand Ambassador. Now a worldwide ambassador for a major whiskey brand, Jimmy was doing advertisements and traveling internationally, often to talk to consumers, distributors, retailers, and large groups. He also signed everything from whiskey bottles to whiskey barrels, but Jimmy most enjoyed hosting personal tasting seminars. In 2007, Jimmy Bedford was recognized as one of the ‘Icons of Whisky’ Lifetime Achievement Award by Whisky Magazine.

In 2008, Jimmy abruptly resigned from Jack Daniels to retire to his rural roots on his farm in Franklin County. On August 7, 2009, at age 69, Jimmy Bedford was found dead outside his barn from an apparent heart attack. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he had what he considered one of the most enviable jobs imaginable — “(I was) making sure Jack Daniel’s Old Number 7 Tennessee Whiskey tasted just the way it had since 1866”. To those of us who still enjoy the smoothness and special taste of a Jack Daniel’s whiskey product, we can tip our hats to the legacy of Jimmy Bedford and exclaim with a smile, “Jimmy, you did your job!”

Contributed by: Todd Rust, Durham, North Carolina

with support from M. J. (Michael) Jacobs, Tennessee Whiskey Section Editor, Smyrna, Tennessee