By the 1980s, blues and soul music were effectively dead as mainstream cultural forces and the artists who had pioneered those genres were languishing in obscurity. However, this music from America’s past was crying out to be rediscovered and the unlikely agents of its revival were two white comedians: Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. 

The year 1980 marked a transition in popular music. Disco was on its way out. At the forefront of rock music, there were young bands like Van Halen and AC/DC, but rock had lost two of its most popular bands of the previous decade—Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. Aerosmith collapsed under the weight of the band members’ heroin addictions and the band was to remain irrelevant until the musicians managed to revive their careers in the middle of the decade. Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham died after a night of heavy drinking and—perhaps realising that his booming presence was irreplaceable—the surviving members elected to break up. The Rolling Stones were still going strong but were no longer the anti-establishment force they had been. The punk furore had quickly died down after the initial boom of the late 1970s and the genre went back underground. The Clash was the only punk band that mattered that was still part of the mainstream. New Wave—a more radio-friendly form of punk merged with synthesisers—had taken disco’s place in the dance clubs. Black music was in an especially tenuous position as disco effectively cannibalised black genres like soul, R&B, and funk. African-American artists would have to forge a new path and not make the mistake of becoming too reliant on any one subgenre. Meanwhile, a resurgence of the popular music of the past was poised to happen.

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi first met in 1974. Aykroyd was a member of the Second City comedy troupe’s Toronto theatre and at night he ran Club 505, where he played his favourite soul and blues records. Belushi was in town scouting for talent for The National Lampoon Radio Hour of which he was a cast member. Despite being polar opposites in many ways—Aykroyd was reserved, while Belushi was the life of the party—the two quickly became fast friends. After performing their set at Second City, Aykroyd and Belushi went to Club 505, where the Toronto-based Downchild Blues Band’s record Straight Up was playing over the sound system. Aykroyd noticed Belushi getting into the music and assumed that the Chicago native must have some knowledge of the blues. To his surprise, Belushi said that he was a fan of hard rock bands like Deep Purple, Bad Company, Grand Funk Railroad, and Led Zeppelin and had never listened to much blues. Aykroyd informed Belushi that the bands he loved were merely playing a faster version of the blues. Howard Shore, who would later go on to become the musical director of Saturday Night Live for its first five seasons, overheard the two men’s conversation and jokingly nicknamed Aykroyd and Belushi “The Blues Brothers.”

The two men’s performances with Second City and Belushi’s performances with The National Lampoon Radio Hour drew the attention of Toronto native Lorne Michaels. Michaels had moved to New York to develop a late-night TV show for NBC. Saturday Night—renamed Saturday Night Live in 1977—was an immediate hit from the airing of its very first episode on 11 October 1975. It was the first TV show to be made by the first generation to grow up with television: these were people in their twenties and early thirties making a program aimed at a younger audience. The fact that Saturday Night Live aired after the watershed, at 11:30 pm, meant that the writers and performers could get away with edgier humour and make overt references to drug use, such as in the skit in which John Belushi as Beethoven plays and sings the Ray Charles song “What I’d Say” after snorting cocaine.

After finishing an episode of Saturday Night Live, the cast and crew would meet up at a bar Dan Aykroyd rented called the Holland Tunnel Blues Bar which had instruments waiting onstage for patrons to jam with if they chose. It was here—as well as at gigs at which they performed with local blues bands—that Aykroyd and Belushi began to perfect their Blues Brothers’ personae.  Aykroyd’s alter ego was Elwood Blues and John Belushi’s was Jake Blues. They portrayed two blood brothers who were raised in a Chicago orphanage and were mentored in the blues by a janitor named Curtis. The duo donned black fedoras and sunglasses as a tribute to blues guitarist John Lee Hooker and wore black suits and ties in homage to comedian Lenny Bruce. Aykroyd also began writing a screenplay explaining the characters’ backstory. Lorne Michaels allowed the duo to play with the Saturday Night Live band as a warm-up act before their shows, but he did not think the act would ever translate into an actual skit. Instead, he had Aykroyd and Belushi perform a blues number while dressed as bees—a recurring theme on Saturday Night Live that Lorne Michaels perversely enjoyed including in as many episodes as possible because the NBC executives hated it.

The Blues Brothers concept wouldn’t die though. When Animal House was released in 1978, John Belushi was established as a comedy superstar. Comedian Steve Martin had become a Blues Brothers fan during his stints as a guest host on Saturday Night Live and he invited Aykroyd and Belushi to open for him during his residency at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. They eagerly accepted. There was only one problem. They didn’t have a proper band and they had only two weeks to put one together. The pair recruited Paul Schaffer, Saturday Night Live’s band leader, to help them assemble a band on the fly. Within only a few days, they had recruited some of the best session musicians in the industry. Paul Schaffer himself played the keyboards. Blue Lou Marini, Alan “Mr Fabulous” Rubin, Tom “Triple Scale” Scott, Tom “Bones” Malone, and Birch “Crimson Slide” Johnson made up the horn section. Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who played with the Howlin’ Wolf, and drummer Steve “Getdwa” Jordan also joined them. 

Two of the band members were soul music royalty. Aykroyd and Belushi pulled off quite a coup by recruiting guitarist Steve “The Colonel” Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, two of the four members of Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the house band for Stax Records. (Band leader Booker T. Jones could not join due to other commitments and drummer Al Jackson had died several years earlier.) Booker T. and the M.G.’s had backed the likes of Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding on their biggest hits and were later to have a hit of their own with “Green Onions.” Cropper and Dunn would be the key to reviving both Stax Records and southern soul music.