Underrated musicians

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Name one male and one female active musician you feel are underrated or don't get properly acknowledged for their singing or playing chops.
I'll start with Sara Watkins from Nickel Creek and I'm With Her fame and Marty Stuart, traditional country, bluegrass player.
 
Originally Posted by Aichiguy
Name one male and one female active musician you feel are underrated or don't get properly acknowledged for their singing or playing chops.
I'll start with Sara Watkins from Nickel Creek and I'm With Her fame and Marty Stuart, traditional country, bluegrass player.


I know nothing about Sara Watkins but Marty Stuart is far from being underrated and popular. I assume you are young, Aichiguy? He was one of my favorites back in the 90's when I listened to country music quite often.

John Marty Stuart (born September 30, 1958) is a multiple Grammy Award-winning, American country music singer-songwriter, known for both his traditional style, and eclectic merging of rockabilly, honky tonk, and traditional country music. In the early 1990s, he had a string of country hits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Stuart
 
I think Marty is underrated and underappreciated TODAY. He plays and sings as well as he did decades ago. He's a victim of his genre for sure..
 
For a male I'll go with Chris Isaak.

For a female I would've taken Eva Cassidy but unfortunately she passed. Check out her version of Fields of Gold by Sting. Pure and beautiful like a feather caressing silk. In her place I'll take Katie Melua. She didn't have much success here but she was quite popular a decade ago across the Atlantic. Love his song:
 
Brian May.

Ask a guitar player and I think he gets the appropriate amount of kudos. It seems the general public has forgotten there were a number of other musicians in the band not named Freddie Mercury. Don't get me wrong, Freddie deserves all the praise he gets, but many people hear Queen and automatically go to the layered vocals of Bohemian Rhapsody, not the epic guitar work on Brighton Rock.

Bonnie Raitt.

Again, this is a more general public perception. General public thinks of adult contemporary radio staples like Something to Talk About. Completely unknown by that crowd is her phenomenal blues slide work that has put her on-level with many of the greats. Personally, Bonnie Raitt's guitar work is like a warm blanket.
 
Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson. They are all huge in the music community, but seem not as popular to people who aren't/weren't musicians.
 
Can't remember her name exactly, but she was the singer with Cock Robin. Such a great voice, but never really got noticed. That band as well, they had some really neat and complicated stuff. You know I'm going to say Rush also. Another singer that still performs today and are still kind of popular but not super big, is Robin Zander with Cheap Trick. His voice and range are absolutely incredible.
 
There's so many great guitar players that the general public have never heard of (but most of the big names know them). One example for me is Albert Lee, but there are so many more.

As a kid that listened to rock and top-40 growing up I remember seeing guys like Roy Clark and Glen Campbell as just TV personalities that happened to play. I was much older before I became aware of just how absolutely great those two gentlemen were.
 
Rich Brotherton, ex-member of Robert Earl Keen's band is a phenomenal guitar player.

If you listen to EmmyLou Harris' twangcaster playing on the Buck Owens instrumental "Buckeroo" (on her hard to find live "Last Date" album), you realize just how under-rated her playing is as well.

But Larry Campbell has to be THE most under-rated MULTI instrumentalist in all of the genre, with Lloyd Maines a very close second.
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