House of Blues is a chain of 13 live music concert halls and restaurants in major markets throughout the United States. House of Blues first location was in Cambridge's Harvard Square. It was opened in 1992 by Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of Hard Rock Cafe, and Dan Aykroyd, star of The Blues Brothers. House of Blues is considered a major venue for touring bands.

The first House of Blues opened its doors on November 26, 1992 in the Harvard Square commercial district and retail area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was originally financed by Dan Aykroyd, Aerosmith, Paul Shaffer, River Phoenix, James Belushi and Harvard University among others. This original location has since closed. However, the hands-in-concrete driveway where members of the Blues Brothers and others left their mark, still remains.

Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi remain closely associated with the brand and are present for most openings, most recently attending and performing at the Grand Opening Celebrations of both the Houston and the Boston Houses of Blues.

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist. He is the originator of funk music and is a major figure of 20th century popular music and dance.

In a career that spanned decades, Brown profoundly influenced the development of many different musical genres. Brown moved on a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music making. Brown performed in concerts, first making his rounds across the Chitlin' Circuit, and then across the country and later around the world, along with appearing in shows on television and in movies. Although he contributed much to the music world through his hitmaking, Brown holds the record as the artist who charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 without ever hitting number one on that chart.

For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters. In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1990 into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Eric Johnson (born August 17, 1954) is an American musician, songwriter, and vocalist from Austin, Texas. Best known for his electric guitar skills, Johnson is also a highly proficient acoustic, lap steel, resonator, and bass guitarist as well as an accomplished pianist and vocalist.

Johnson has mastered a wide array of musical genres evidenced by the many different styles incorporated in both his studio and live performances including rock, blues, jazz, fusion, soul, folk, New Age, classical, and country and western.

Guitar Player magazine has called Johnson "one of the most respected guitarists on the planet". Johnson's stylistic diversity and technical proficiency with the guitar have been praised by Bill Hicks. His 1990 platinum-selling, full-length album, Ah Via Musicom, produced the single, "Cliffs Of Dover", for which Johnson won the 1991 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

Born into a musically-inclined family, Johnson and his three sisters studied piano and his father was a whistling enthusiast. Johnson started learning the guitar at age 11 and rapidly began progressing through the music that would heavily influence his future style, including Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Chet Atkins, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, Jerry Reed, Bob Dylan and Django Reinhardt, among others. At the age of 15, he joined his first professional band—Mariani, a psychedelic rock group. In 1968, Johnson and the group recorded a demo, which saw extremely limited release; years later the recording became a prized collector's item.

Kool & the Gang are an American jazz, R&B, soul, and funk group, originally formed in 1964 as the Jazziacs based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

They went through several musical phases during the course of their recording career, starting out with a purist jazz sound, then becoming practitioners of R&B and funk, progressing to a smooth pop-funk ensemble, and in the post-millennium creating music with a modern, electro-pop sound.

They have sold over 70 million albums worldwide.

The group's main members over the years included brothers Robert Bell (known as "Kool") on bass and Ronald Bell on tenor saxophone, lead vocalist James "J.T." Taylor, George Brown on drums, Robert Mickens on trumpet, Dennis Thomas on alto saxophone, Claydes Charles Smith on guitar, and Rick Westfield on keyboards. The Bell brothers' father was an acquaintance of Thelonious Monk, and the brothers were friends with Leon Thomas.

In 1964 Robert formed an instrumental band called the Jazziacs with five high-school friends.^{[citation needed]}They changed their name to "Kool & the Flames" in 1967, then "Kool & the Gang" in 1969 (to avoid confusion with James Brown's Famous Flames) and were signed by Gene Redd to his new record label De-Lite Records in 1969. They first hit the pop charts with the release of their debut eponymous album.

John Clayton Mayer ( /ˈmeɪ.ər/ MAY-ər; (born October 16, 1977) is an American pop and blues rock musician, singer-songwriter, recording artist, and music producer. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, he attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. He moved to Atlanta in 1997, where he refined his skills and gained a following, and he now lives in New York City. His first two studio albums, Room for Squares and Heavier Things, did well commercially, achieving multi-platinum status. In 2003, he won a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Your Body Is a Wonderland."

Mayer began his career performing mainly acoustic rock, but gradually began a transition towards the blues genre in 2005 by collaborating with renowned blues artists such as B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and Eric Clapton, and by forming the John Mayer Trio. The blues influence can be heard throughout his 2005 live album Try! with the John Mayer Trio and his third studio album Continuum, released in September 2006. At the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in 2007 Mayer won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Waiting on the World to Change". He released his fourth studio album, Battle Studies, in November 2009. His fifth album, Born and Raised, was released on May 22, 2012. He has sold over 10 million albums in the U.S. and 20 million albums worldwide.