John Belushi’s Widow Left Behind Something of Her Own: Deeply Personal Songs

Backstage at an Illinois festival last weekend, two children of pop culture legends were hashing out a set list. “We’ll do ‘The River’ and then ‘Good Morning Sun’ and then ‘Bones’ last,” 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 cautions, “That’s all the time we’re going to have. The most time we have is four songs.”

The setting was the second Blues Brothers Con, a day-long festival celebrating all things related to the fictional but enduring duo created by Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. The 4,800 gathered at the Old Joliet Prison in Joliet, Illinois, now a museum long after it was featured in 1980’s The Blues Brothers movie, were waiting to see Aykroyd and Belushi’s brother Jim once again don black suits and hats and romp through classic blues, R&B, and soul songs.

But the songs in the set list under discussion weren’t written by a member of the Taylor or Simon clan or covered by the Blues Brothers. Instead, they were the songs of Judy Belushi Pisano, who died last month of endometrial cancer at age 73. In addition to books and a documentary about her late husband, Pisano, who was never known as a musician, left behind a surprise. In the later stages of her illnessm she recorded an album’s worth of wry, poignant, and reflective tunes about her life, her battle with cancer, and her relationship with her late first husband, whose work and image she long championed and defended. And on this night in Joliet, the Blues Brothers Con crowd will get to hear them publicly for the first time.

“It’s the only recent album I can think of that manages to be both deep and fun with every song,” says Ben Taylor, who is producing the album of those recordings. “With songs that approach these super-deep topics, even if somebody is as good at concentrating complicated ideas into simple ones as Neil Young, it’s hard for it not to be a bummer. But Judy floated over the bummer with how much fun she made everything.”

Pisano was long associated with Belushi, who died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. in 1982. She was also a creative partner, designing the logo for the Blues Brothers and contributing to the back story of their characters Jake and Elwood. “She was our blues sister,” Aykroyd tells Rolling Stone. “She was a creative participant, not only as John’s wife but in other ways.” Following Belushi’s death, Pisano (who remarried, to Vincent Pisano, in 1990; they divorced in 2010) carved out her own career She co-wrote best-selling humor books (Titters 101: An Introduction to Women’s Literature and The Mom Book) and penned Samurai Widow, a memoir about her life with Belushi; she also co-wrote a biography of him that was intended to offset Bob Woodward’s Wired.

Five years ago, Pisano, who’d taken up the ukulele, made her first tentative steps into a late-life music career, writing a song, “Bones the Dog,” for her pet who’d just died. According to her sister Pam Jacklin, Pisano’s turn toward music wasn’t completely out of left field: Even before she met Belushi, Pisano loved everything from her parents’ Sinatra records to rock and blues, and played drums “haphazardly for a while.” Pisano also wrote poetry in her youth.

In 2020, Pisano was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus, and her songwriting went in another, more reflective direction, heard in “Best Days,” which also touches on her life with Belushi (“I married a rebel/I fought with the devil/And I lived to tell”). “Come Back Soon, Babe” took its title from a note that her late husband left for her when Pisano, grappling with her husband’s drug addiction, “went off for a little time to get a break,” says Jacklin. Pisano then wrote a poem about that time, which became the basis for a song decades later.

By 2022, Pisano had enough songs that she decided to perform a few of them at the first Blues Brothers Con, also held at the Old Joliet Prison. Before the show, though, she came down with what she thought was laryngitis. At her doctor’s urging, she decided to persevere. But onstage, Jacklin recalls, “She sang and after the first stanza, she stopped and said to the crowd, ‘I’m not going to put you through this torture.’”

As Pisano learned, laryngitis wasn’t the issue. Her cancer had spread and a tumor was now pressing against her vocal cords — just as she was about to start a new chapter in her creative life as a singer. “It felt cruel,” says Luke Pisano. “She had unlocked this thing to keep her going, and it was taken away from her.”

A year later in 2023, Pisano entered hospice care and was given months to live. In her bed, and 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 raspier and more frail. Taylor gently augmented the recordings with additional instruments to enhance the songs and Pisano’s performances. “The challenge was to not get in the way, to not make instrumentation that was actually going to compete with her voice in a way that was going to ruin it,” says Taylor.

According to Taylor, the frailty of Pisano’s voice as heard on those recordings only adds to their power. “Most of what’s there is deeply fragile, because it’s her in the last stages of her life,” he says. “But even when she would play towards the end of her life, when lot of vocal cords were paralyzed and just not working anymore, she could play a song by herself on the ukulele and hold your attention for three and a half minutes in a really compelling way.”

At Blues Brothers Con, the crowd heard Ben Taylor, his aunt (and James’ sister) Kate, and singer Precious Taylor (niece of blues great Koko Taylor) perform some of those songs, from the gentle lullaby “River” to the heartbreaking “Bones the Dog.” Two years ago, ticket buyers to Blues Brothers Con lined up to get Pisano’s autograph; this year they listened attentively to others sing her 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 precisely will come of the recordings has yet to be determined. According to Luke Pisano, some may be retained in their original states; others may benefit from additional production or guest appearances to compensate for his mother’s later vocal issues. Carly Simon, a longtime friend of Pisano’s, has already contributed tracks for several of the songs; other guests could follow.  

“What Ben and I had discussed is where to take it from here,” says Pisano in a backstage trailer at Blues Brothers Con, with his aunt and the Taylor family members sitting nearby. “He made the great point that if anyone else sings these songs, it’s going to take something away from it, because she did so many of them so effortlessly, and they’re so her. But her voice being in the condition it was, there’s room for possibly exploring [augmenting the tapes], if it feels right, to see what kind of album we could build out. At the very least, if nothing else happens from this, we have something that we can say, ‘Listen to this —this is unbelievable.’”

But Pisano says his mother did want the songs to be an album, and he’s intent on making her dream come belatedly true. “Her biggest thing, she said one time, 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 her.”