The Star Tribune put it plainly: “What do Prince, Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks have in common? Those magnificent Petersons.”
That sentence requires context. The Petersons are a family of musicians from Minneapolis. The family patriarch was Willie Peterson, the matriarch Jeanne Arland Peterson. Their children — Linda, Billy, Ricky, Patty, and Paul — became professional musicians of national standing. Their grandchildren continued the tradition. Collectively, the Peterson family appears on over one hundred gold and platinum records.
I am not a neutral observer. Patty Peterson and I worked together at KBEM Jazz 88. Jason Peterson DeLaire, one of the grandchildren, was my high school classmate. I watched him become one of the most in-demand session and touring musicians of his generation. When I tell you the Peterson family is central to the Twin Cities jazz story, I am telling you from inside the room they helped build.
Willie and Jeanne Arland Peterson
The foundation was Willie Peterson and Jeanne Arland Peterson. Willie was a pianist and bandleader who worked the Twin Cities scene for decades. Jeanne Arland Peterson was a pianist, vocalist, and songwriter who became one of the city’s most respected performers — a complete musician in her own right, not simply the matriarch of a musical family.
They did not just model musicianship for their children. They created an environment in which music was understood as a serious profession, a craft worth developing to the highest possible level, and a connection to a community larger than any individual career. Five children grew up in that environment. All five became professional musicians. That outcome is not accidental.
The Second Generation
Linda Peterson is a pianist, vocalist, and bandleader who has released five solo recordings. She has led her own groups through the Twin Cities scene for decades — not as a sideman or a supporting player but as a front-and-center bandleader who writes, arranges, and performs her own work.
Billy Peterson became one of the most in-demand bassists in the country. His session credits include Bob Dylan, Leo Kottke, Steve Miller, and Eddie Harris — a list that spans folk, rock, jazz, and soul and indicates the range of a musician who can serve the song without making the song about himself. That quality, the ability to be exactly what the music needs without overstating your own role, is the mark of a bassist who has figured something out that most musicians never figure out.
Ricky Peterson built his career in keyboards. His credits include Prince, David Sanborn, Fleetwood Mac, and Stevie Nicks. He played with Prince during some of the most productive years of Prince’s career — which is to say, he was in rooms where extraordinary music was being made, and he contributed to making it extraordinary.
Patty Peterson is a vocalist, broadcaster, and producer who has been a central figure in Twin Cities jazz for more than four decades. Her seven Minnesota Music Awards reflect the breadth of her contribution: she performs, she broadcasts, she produces, and she advocates for the music. In 2020, the Jazz Journalists Association named her a Jazz Hero — an annual designation recognizing community advocates who make exceptional contributions to their local jazz ecosystem. In 2019, the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame inducted her. She produces the Minnesota Jazz Legends concert series, which documents and celebrates the musicians who built the local scene. And she is still on the air at KBEM Jazz 88, hosting and introducing music for an audience that has been listening to her voice for decades.
I worked alongside Patty at KBEM. What she brings to the broadcast is not just knowledge of the music — though that knowledge is deep — but a connection to the community of musicians that comes from having been embedded in it since childhood. When she introduces an artist, she often knows them personally. When she talks about a recording, she often knows the story behind it. That is not something you can research your way into. It comes from being there.
Paul Peterson was discovered by Prince at seventeen years old. He became a member of The Time and appeared in Purple Rain. He was, by any measure, a prodigy — someone identified early, pulled into the highest-stakes musical environment in Minneapolis, and given a career that most musicians spend their entire lives trying to earn.
The Third Generation
The grandchildren of Willie and Jeanne Arland Peterson continued the pattern.
Jason Peterson DeLaire is a saxophonist and vocalist who was my classmate in high school. I watched him as a young man, before he became the musician he became. The trajectory was not a surprise — the talent was obvious — but the range of his career has been extraordinary: Michael Bolton, Prince, Alexander O’Neal, Richard Marx, Donny Osmond, Oleta Adams. He was the first of the Peterson grandchildren to go professional, and he established the template: serious musicianship, broad stylistic range, the ability to serve the music whatever the genre.
The fourth generation is now performing professionally. The pattern has not broken.
The Peterson Family Christmas Shows
For over thirty-five years, the Petersons have presented annual Christmas shows in the Twin Cities. These are not nostalgia events. They are performances that bring multiple generations of the family onto the same stage, in front of audiences that have been coming back year after year.
The continuity of those shows — the same family, the same tradition, thirty-five-plus years — is a document of something the Twin Cities has built: a musical dynasty that stays. Many families produce one or two professional musicians. The Petersons produced five children who reached national prominence, grandchildren who extended that reach, and a fourth generation now entering the profession. That does not happen without a culture that takes the music seriously, a city that provides the infrastructure to develop it, and a family that understood both.
What the Petersons Tell You About Minneapolis
The Peterson family story is a Twin Cities story. Not because Minneapolis is uniquely nurturing of musical talent — every city has talented musicians — but because Minneapolis provided the infrastructure that allowed talent to develop, stay, and build something lasting.
KBEM Jazz 88, Patty Peterson’s longtime broadcast home, is part of that infrastructure. The Artist’s Quarter, where multiple Petersons performed over the decades, is part of it. The Dakota, the Jazz Society, the network of musicians and educators and venues that make a scene real — all of it provided the context in which the Peterson family became what it became.
The Star Tribune line about Prince, Bob Dylan, and Stevie Nicks is a good shorthand. But the deeper truth is not about the famous names the Petersons worked with. It is about what they built here, in the city where they stayed, for the audience that has been listening since the beginning.
The Peterson family Christmas shows have run for over thirty-five years in the Twin Cities. Patty Peterson broadcasts on KBEM Jazz 88 at 88.5 FM in Minneapolis. The Peterson family catalog — across multiple generations and dozens of recordings — is available on streaming platforms.
