Backstage at a At last weekend’s Illinois Festival, two children of pop culture legends worked out a set list. “We’re playing ‘The River’ and then ‘Good Morning Sun’ and then ‘Bones’,” says Ben Taylor, the rugged-looking son of James Taylor and Carly Simon. Luke Pisano – whose mother was Judy Belushi Pisano, the writer and artist once married to John Belushi – nods, but warns, “That’s all the time we’re going to have. We’re only going to have time for four songs.”
The venue was the second Blues Brothers Con, a day-long festival celebrating all things related to the fictional but enduring duo of Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. The 4,800 attendees gathered at the Old Joliet Prison in Joliet, Illinois, which is now a museum since it was put on display in the 1980s. The Blues Brothers film, were waiting to see Aykroyd and Belushi’s brother Jim again in black suits and hats and watch them romp through classic blues, R&B and soul songs.
But the songs in the setlist in question were not written by a member of the Taylor or Simon clan, nor were they covered by the Blues Brothers. Rather, they were songs by Judy Belushi Pisano, who died of uterine cancer last month at age 73. In addition to books and a documentary about her late husband, Pisano, who was never known as a musician, left a surprise behind her. In the later stages of her illness, she recorded an album full of wry, poignant and thoughtful songs about her life, her battle with cancer and her relationship with her late first husband, whose work and image she long supported and defended. And this evening in Joliet, the audience at Blues Brothers Con will be able to hear those songs publicly for the first time.
“It’s the only recent album I can think of that manages to be both profound and entertaining with every song,” says Ben Taylor, who produced the album of these recordings. “With songs that deal with these super-deep themes, it’s hard not to be disappointed, even when someone is as good at making complicated ideas into simple ones as Neil Young. But Judy overcame that frustration by making everything so entertaining.”
Pisano was long associated with Belushi, who died of a drug overdose at LA’s Chateau Marmont in 1982. She was also a creative partner, designing the logo for the Blues Brothers and contributing to the backstory of their characters Jake and Elwood. “Jacqueline was our Blues sister,” Aykroyd says Rolling Stone. “She was a creative participant, not only as John’s wife but in other ways as well.” After Belushi’s death, Pisano (who remarried in 1990, Vincent Pisano; they divorced in 2010) struck out on her own. She co-wrote humorous bestsellers (Titters 101: An Introduction to Children’s Literature And The Mama Book) and written Samurai Widowa memoir about her life with Belushi; she also co-authored a biography about him, which was a counterpart to Bob Woodward’s Wired.
Five years ago, Pisano, who had started playing the ukulele, took her first tentative steps into a late-life music career, writing the song “Bones the Dog” for her pet who had just died. According to her sister Pam Jacklin, Pisano’s turn to music was not entirely accidental: Even before she met Belushi, Pisano loved everything from her parents’ Sinatra records to rock and blues and played drums “on the side for a while.” Pisano also wrote poetry in her youth.
In 2020, Pisano was diagnosed with uterine cancer and her songwriting went in a different, more thoughtful direction, heard in “Best Days,” which also touches on her life with Belushi (“I married a rebel/
I wrestled with the devil/And I lived to tell about it.) “Come Back Soon, Babe” takes its title from a note her late husband left her when Pisano, struggling with her husband’s drug addiction, “went away for a little while to take a break,” Jacklin says. Pisano then wrote a poem about that time that became the basis for a song decades later.
By 2022, Pisano had so many songs that she decided to perform some of them at the first Blues Brothers Con, also held at Old Joliet Prison. Before the show, however, she came down with what she thought was laryngitis. At the urging of her doctor, she decided to persevere. But on stage, Jacklin recalls, “she sang and after the first verse, she stopped and said to the audience, ‘I’m not going to put you through that torture.'”
As Pisano learned, it wasn’t the laryngitis that was the problem. Her cancer had spread, and a tumor was now pressing on her vocal cords – just as she was about to begin a new chapter in her creative life as a singer. “It was cruel,” says Luke Pisano. “She had unlocked this thing so she could keep going, and it was taken away from her.”
A year later, in 2023, Pisano was placed in a hospice and given only a few months to live. In her bed, often with her ukulele, she enlisted Taylor to record her songs. But her condition, Jacklin says, robbed Pisano of her voice and her singing was now scratchier and more frail. Taylor carefully supplemented the recordings with additional instruments to enhance the songs and Pisano’s performances. “The challenge was to stay out of the way and not use instruments that would actually compete with her voice and ruin it,” Taylor says.
Taylor says the fragility of Pisano’s voice, heard on these recordings, only adds to its power. “Most of it is deeply fragile, because it’s her in the last stages of her life,” he says. “But even when she was playing towards the end of her life, when many of her vocal cords were paralyzed and just didn’t work anymore, she could play a song on the ukulele alone and hold your attention for three and a half minutes in a really captivating way.”
At Blues Brothers Con, audiences heard Ben Taylor, his aunt (and James’ sister) Kate, and singer Precious Taylor (niece of blues legend Koko Taylor) perform some of these songs, from the gentle lullaby “River” to the heartbreaking “Bones the Dog.” Two years ago, Blues Brothers Con ticket buyers lined up to get Pisano’s autograph; this year, they listened intently to others singing their songs and greeted them warmly. Recordings of two of Pisano’s compositions, “Fingernails (Ba Ba Ba)” and “Best Days,” were also played with accompanying videos.
What exactly will become of the recordings has not yet been decided. According to Luke Pisano, some recordings could remain in their original state, others could benefit from additional production or guest appearances to compensate for his mother’s later vocal problems. Carly Simon, a long-time friend of Pisano’s, has already contributed tracks to several songs; more guests could follow.
“Ben and I discussed where we should go from here,” says Pisano in a backstage trailer at Blues Brothers Con, with his aunt and the Taylor family sitting nearby. “He made it clear that there was something to be gained from having someone else sing these songs, because she sang a lot of them so effortlessly and they were so much her. But with her voice being in the condition it was in, there’s room for possible exploration (of expanding the tapes) if it felt right, to see what kind of album we could make out of it. At least, if nothing else comes of it, we have something to say, ‘Listen to this — this is incredible.'”
But Pisano says his mother wanted the songs to appear on an album, and he is determined to make her dream come true after the fact. “Her biggest concern, she once said, was, ‘I just want people to hear this music,'” he says. “She was really serious about that. And that was one of the promises I made to her.”
