Back in 1995, the singer-songwriter — and excellent cartoonist — Peter Blegvad released a song later made semi-famous when a cover version by Loudon Wainwright III was featured on the soundtrack for Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. The song, “Daughter,” is as sweet and true as any song ever written by a parent to a child, and manages to capture in relatively few words the intense, tender, exasperating and, through it all, loving relationships that dads and daughters enjoy — or, at times, simply endure.
(Wainwright, interestingly, enough, is the father of Rufus Wainwright and the son of a longtime LIFE magazine writer and editor, Loudon Wainwright, Jr.)
Here, in a special Father’s Day gallery, LIFE.com applauds that unique familial bond with photos of famous fathers and their daughters — and, for a little variety, one famous daughter and her dad.
Blegvad’s lyrics to “Daughter,” meanwhile, are worth celebrating in their own right. See them below. You can also buy the song itself, or get the whole CD, Just Woke Up, on which “Daughter” originally appeared. Go. Now. Buy it.
“Daughter”
© 1995 Peter Blegvad
Everything she sees
she says she wants.
And everything she says she wants
I see she gets.
That’s my daughter in the water,
everything she owns I bought her,
Everything she owns.
That’s my daughter in the water,
Everything she knows I taught her.
Everything she knows.
Everything I say
She takes to heart.
And everything she takes,
She takes apart.
That’s my daughter in the water,
Every time she fell I caught her,
Every time she fell.
That’s my daughter in the water
I lost every time I fought her.
Yeah, I lost every time.
Every time she blinks
she strikes somebody blind,
And everything she thinks
Blows her tiny mind.
Happy Father’s Day, everyone.