Honorific nicknames in popular music

Honorific nicknames are used when describing popular music artists, most often in the media or by fans, to indicate their significance, and are often religious, familial, or most frequently royal and aristocratic titles, used metaphorically. Honorific nicknames were used in classical music in Europe even in the early 19th century, with figures such as Mozart being called "The father of modern music" and Bach "The father of modern piano music". They were also particularly prominent in African-American culture in the post-Civil War era, perhaps as a means of conferring status that had been negated by slavery, and as a result entered early jazz and blues music, including figures such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie. In U.S. culture, despite its republican constitution and ideology, royalist honorific nicknames have been used to describe leading figures in various areas of activity, such as industry, commerce, sports, and the media; father or mother have been used for innovators, and royal titles such as king and queen for dominant figures in a field. In the 1930s and 1940s, as jazz and swing music were gaining popularity, it was the more commercially successful white artists Paul Wh