The latest Paul Simon thread reminded me I’ve been meaning to pose this question in CS:
There are a lot of successful, famous, or noteworthy musicians whose children are also musicians. I’m curious about which of those kids eclipsed their parent?
For this question, there are just a few criteria to follow:
Both parent and child have to have been musicians and the success had to be musical. Any musical context is fine.
The parent must have been successful and achieved some level of fame. Lots of noteworthy musicians have had non-famous musician parents.
This is the key one: the child must have outshined the parent. However successful the parent was, the child must be greater. Jakob Dylan has been successful, but he has a long way to go to eclipse Bob.
And some non-criteria:
Grandchildren, nieces, nephews, etc. are fine too.
Eclipsed can be whatever you define it as: success, fame, etc.
My hypothesis is that there aren’t a lot of examples in music, unlike other disciples – sports, business, acting, etc. If there is a non-musician example you really want to share, feel free.
There is some debate as to whether Leopold Mozart was a famous composer, but at least some folks think he was at least passingly famous in Germany. His son, Wolfgang, was rather more successful.
John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful had a father also named John Sebastian that was a classical harmonica player. He had some recording and a successful musical career. I’m not sure what your threshold for a famous parent would be, but I’d think being known as “the master of the chromatic harmonica” might count?
Johann Sebastian Bach’s music went out of style by the 1730s and was seen as stodgy and old-fashioned. While his skill as an organist was noted, as a composer his reputation was far overshadowed by first his second son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and later by his youngest son Johann Christian Bach, to the point where anyone in the music biz referring to “Bach” in the latter half of the 18th century meant one of the sons (usually CPE unless they were in England where JC lived and worked).
It was really only in the 19th century with the Bach revival and Felix Mendelssohn’s championing of JS’s music that it made a comeback at all. The rest is literally history, and of course now the father overshadows his sons again.
I would argue that despite the clear talent of all three, the fathers were more famous by far. Arlo did carve his own niche in the 1960s counterculture (particularly with “Alice’s Restaurant”) to set him apart from his iconic father, but the other two were basically just nepo babies who launched their careers based on their parentage.
One could maybe make an argument that, at least these days, Arlo’s Alice’s Restaurant brings him more name recognition than Woody among the general public. I wouldn’t argue that that makes him ‘more famous’, though- Woody has a permanent and prominent place in the history books, while Arlo merits at most a footnote.
So Whitney Houston achieved much greater fame than her very talented jazz singer mother Sissy Houston.
Nora Jones’s fame probably exceeds her father’s. A lot of people don’t know that her father is Ravi Shankar who in the west at least is mostly known for his association with the Beatles.
Was Mozart’s Father famous enough to count? I’m going by the film only here and had the impression that Leopold was famous in his day.
That doesn’t seem right, she performed as the lead but in the tiny Jazz realm instead of Pop, Rock or Country. I saw her live as a Jazz and Blues festival that I assisted at. She was great.
It looks like she had 8 solo albums in Jazz & Soul and won to Grammy’s for Traditional Soul.
I’m familiar with his daughter Anoushka and his nephew Ananda (whose eponymous album is a lot of fun), but I had no idea Norah Jones was his daughter too.