Album of the Day

As legend would have it, “Joliet” Jake and Elwood Blues grew up in a Rock Island, Illinois orphanage, where they learned R&B music from a janitor. In reality, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd cooked up The Blues Brothers for a Saturday Night Live sketch and things grew from there, resulting in BRIEFCASE FULL OF BLUES. The Atlantic album was recorded live at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheatre with a backing band that included SNL’s Paul Shaffer, saxophonist Tom Scott and Booker T. & The M.G.’s mainstays Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn. Powered by energetic performances and a pair of successful singles (“Rubber Biscuit” and “Soul Man,” which debuted on Billboard's Hot 100 chart on this day in 1978), BRIEFCASE FULL OF BLUES eventually went double-Platinum.