Old Crow

I found these ads for Old Crow Whiskey featuring Basil Duke and really didn't get the connection between the two but stashed them away for future use.  Today, however, I was skimming through Duke's memoirs and found a description of barbeques that were held in Kentucky when Duke was a boy.

 

Much drinking was neither encouraged nor tolerated; but a reasonable quantity of "Old Crow," the most famous whiskey ever made in Kentucky, was supplied and used in moderation.

-Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke

Can you imagine an ad campaign today featuring Duke, John Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest?  This campaign seems to have run in the 1950's and early 1960's, playing up the history of Old Crow which dated back to the 1830's.  Other people portrayed in the ad campaign included Buffalo Bill Cody, Walt Whitman, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and Mark Twain.  

While I now understand the connection between Duke, Kentucky and Old Crow, it's still rather amusing to see him, Morgan and Forrest in a piece of modern advertising.  And the jokes just write themselves: Old Crow Whiskey-the drink of choice of traitors, slave-owners and klansmen.