A co-worker of mine sent me some e-mail the other day about a Kansas City band named “Four Fried Chickens And A Coke.” That got me thinking about Jake and Elwood.

If you’re a white guy and you’ve played the blues any time in the last 30 years — especially if you’re a white guy who is a harmonica player — you know about Jake and Elwood. Audiences have probably sized you up, deciding whether you’re the band’s ‘Jake’ or its ‘Elwood.’ You’ve probably worn those Ray-Bans at some point, and maybe even the porkpie hat. If you’re really hopeless, you might have gone Full Jake or Full Elwood, down to the skinny tie, cheap black suit and white shirt. (It’s dark and you’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it!)

Like a lot of white guys who claim to play the blues, I am full of mixed feelings about Jake and Elwood. No two people were more responsible for the decades-long blues revival that started in the early 1980s than the characters created by Belushi and Aykroyd. An awful lot of blues musicians who were pushing brooms in the mid-1970s got to put them down and pick up their Strats again because of the characters the two comedians created.

But as actual musicians, Jake and Elwood were — to put it mildly — of limited talent, and were basically good showmen with a fantastic backing band. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that; a lot of bands have worked that angle over the years, and I’ve been in some of them, playing backup to a front guy with more attitude than chops.

With Jake and Elwood, I’ve always gotten kind of stuck on these points, although I’ve worked past my issues:

1. Were these guys basically putting on a whiteface minstrel show, as their most severe critics claim? There is no doubt that classic blues songs chronicle experiences that are unique to black Americans of a certain era, and white guys sound goofy singing those songs. Every time I hear a white guy sing about goin’ to Louisiana to get him a mojo hand, I feel fairly safe in assuming that the singer probably has no idea what he’s saying. He just likes the sound of the word ‘mojo.’ And I’ve always worried that Jake and Elwood just sort of parroted some songs without understanding them — although I note that they did seem to pick covers that didn’t head too far down that road and made some genius picks, like ‘B Movie Boxcar Blues.’

2. These guys made a lot of money covering music originally written and performed by better musicians who were a lot poorer. Well, so be it: That’s the power of being well-known, and certainly Belushi and Aykroyd earned their comic fame by paying their dues, and they then leveraged that into musical fame. I usually (but not always) can get past this issue pretty easily — because in the wake of Jake and Elwood, the better musicians got back in the spotlight and started making a whole lot more money. Some of them still do. Listen to somebody like Buddy Guy talk about Jake and Elwood some time — he’s grateful, and nobody’s going to argue with his blues creds. Hell, Jake and Elwood have even made me a modest amount of money over the years. What are the chances that I could have been gigging on harmonica over the past quarter-century if those two hadn’t come along?

3. Why do so many restaurants serve sandwiches or entrees that have “Jake” or “Elwood” in the title? After all, Elwood preferred dry white toast and Jake was the chicken-Coke-and-nothing-else guy. These guys clearly didn’t have discriminating palates. Also, they didn’t know how to act in fine restaurants.

One place where I’ve never gotten stuck: Can a white boy play the blues? Of course he can. That’s always been true — if he’s playing a song that is true to his life experiences. I’m not going to sing about being born under a bad sign and not being able to read or write because that is, in a word, ridiculous. Bill Haley probably didn’t understand the one-eyed cat reference when he covered “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” either, which is why his happy sing-song version of this blues standard sounds so clueless. (At least somebody caught on to the verse about the old dresses.)

But I certainly can sing about love and loss, or joy and redemption. If I can make others believe that I know what I’m talking about, through my singing or my harp playing (and trust me, a harmonica can be as expressive as the human voice — I should be able to make you blush when I play some songs), then I can play the blues. It’s as simple as that.

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By the way, if you want to get a real taste of where the modern blues came from, rent or watch Cadillac Records (which currently is making the cable TV movie channel rounds). I already knew most of this story, but the quality of the acting was a big plus. Eamonn Walker as Howlin’ Wolf and Mos Def in a too-small part as Chuck Berry were real surprises, but all of the leads are just great. And if you’re not careful, you might learn something, too.