The only one who could ever reach Dusty Springfield, she told us back in 1969, was the son of a preacher man. As the hit single from her best album - Dusty in Memphis - it is the song that defines Springfield for most of us. It also hints at a wider truth: the importance of the offspring of preachers in modern music.

Let’s just take a handful of the many artists who have covered Springfield’s hit: Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner and Jessica Simpson. It’s a disparate group - the queen of soul, a larger-than-life country legend, an unstoppable R&B dynamo and a manufactured pop star turned actress turned tabloid target. Guess what links them all together? Franklin’s father, the Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, was a Baptist preacher in Memphis, Buffalo and Detroit. Tina Turner’s father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was a Baptist deacon in Tennessee. Jessica (and Ashlee) Simpson’s father, Joe, used to be a Baptist minister at the Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas. Parton only spoils the pattern by a generation - it was her grandfather who was a Pentecostal “holy roller” preacher.

The sons and daughters of preacher men can be found in every generation and genre of popular music. We perhaps understand best the link that leads preachers’ children such as Marvin Gaye or D’Angelo into soul music, because soul evolved as a secular take on gospel. Singing in your daddy’s church can lead naturally to singing in concert halls, and you might even get some starry help along the way. The Reverend Franklin’s fame as a preacher meant that the gospel stars Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward were around to mentor the young Aretha. To underline the link, R&B and soul singers - notably Little Richard and Al Green - have moved between music and ministry. But the sons and daughters of preacher men can also be found in rock (Kings of Leon), boyband pop (Jonas Brothers), rap (Wyclef Jean), alt country (Dawn Kinnard) and soft jazz (Lizz Wright).

Six sons of preacher men (plus one nephew) have new material out tomorrow, with Jonas Brothers featured on Disney’s Camp Rock original soundtrack and Kings of Leon’s Only by the Night album looking set to finally give the band a similar level of success back home in America to that which they’ve enjoyed here. The lives of the Kings of Leon suggest another reason why growing up close to the church can provide a good grounding for life in a band. Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill’s father (and Matthew Followill’s uncle) was a travelling Pentecostal preacher who “toured the circuit” - terminology that itself links preaching with rock’n’rolling. When Nathan described their teenage years to a Rolling Stone journalist, his tales of turning up in a new town every few days, piquing the interest of the local girls, as well as the jealousy and rage of the local boys, sounded uncannily like the life of a band.

It may well be that following a travelling preacher around gets you hooked on the another-night-another-town life, a thought that may also explain why many musicians are “army brats” - those who followed their fathers from military base to military base while growing up, among them the house DJ Armand Van Helden, the R&B singer Amerie, the Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell, the former Soul Coughing front man Mike Doughty, the country legend Emmylou Harris, the crunk star Ciara and the lo-fi pioneer Michelle Shocked.

You could extend the argument that an itinerant childhood prepares you for life in a band even further. The Clash’s Joe Strummer, for example, travelled widely as a child, following his father’s Foreign Office postings. Equally, he attributed much of his character to his reaction against the authority figures of his childhood, which may be another reason why preachers’ children head into the rebellious life of a musician. Mind you, not all preachers appear to be the sober, clean-cut authority figures you might imagine. Take, for example, Joe Simpson’s not very clerical language when describing his daughter Jessica’s attributes: “Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double-Ds! You can’t cover those suckers up!” Er, more tea, vicar?

The Followill boys’ father left the ministry after he was divorced, a big event in his children’s lives. As Nathan has said: “We realised that our dad, the greatest man we ever knew, was only human. And so are we. People are gonna f*** up. They’re gonna want to experiment with drugs, have premarital sex ... ”

Not the Jonas boys, though. They wear “purity rings”, underlining their vow to stay chaste until they’re married. Yet if your route to musical fame is via the Disney organisation, perhaps what you want to inherit from a preacher father is discipline and a Protestant work ethic. Certainly this will have helped Nick Jonas through a gruelling childhood schedule of appearances in stage musicals on top of a full day at school, and through the challenge of living with diabetes.

Even if Kings of Leon have - famously - been somewhat less clean-living, they appear not to have lost their faith. There’s a lyric on their new album that says “Jesus don’t love me”, and Caleb has admitted to the NME that “when it was played back to me and I heard the line ... my eyes welled up with tears. It was the worst thing that I could imagine”.

The influence of the parental preacher casts its shadow in the unlikeliest places. The rap group Three 6 Mafia surprised many people when they won an Oscar in 2006 for their song It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp (causing the host, Jon Stewart, to note: “To recap, Three 6 Mafia 1, Martin Scorsese 0”), but they’ve caused more controversy because of alleged satanic imagery in their lyrics. Three 6 Mafia rapper Juicy J had a simple rebuttal to these claims: there was no way the group could be devil worshippers, because his father was a preacher, and if he started worshipping Satan, his dad would kill him.

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