A Generous Pour: Tall Tales from the Backroom of Jimmy Kelly’s” is the story of Jimmy Kelly's Steak House, Nashville's oldest fine restaurant and the family who started it. Readers will delight in tales of bootleggers and rumrunners, saloons and speakeasies, of hard workers with strong family values, the old genteel Nashville and the new Nashville recording industry, and the mysterious difference between whiskey and bourbon. There are stories about Jack Daniel, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (and even Trigger), Al Capone, Bob Dylan, Grantland Rice, John Jay Hooker Sr., and local characters only a Nashvillian could love. The story of the Kelly family in Tennessee takes readers from the Civil War to Nashville’s postwar boom and the turn of a new century: the Roaring 20s that followed the first World War, the temperance movement that led to Prohibition, and the speakeasy solution that led honest Kelly men to defy a patently bad law as they built a family legacy of beloved restaurants in Nashville. Mike Kelly—James’s great-grandson—has written a fine and rollicking tale of a most interesting time in American history. His affection for his family and his community shows on every page.
