Rosie Flores: Happy to be a Working Girl
Singer-guitarist Rosie Flores gets around. She’s undertaken more than 20 European tours, rocked from Tokyo to Auckland and stormed through just about every honky tonk, dance hall and rock club in the United States. But Flores isn’t taking anything for granted. “The guitar is the love of my life, it’s my first love, and I still practice every day.” Flores said. “It’s a challenge, but you just keep growing. I spend more time with my guitar than any guy I’ve ever dated!”
The Austin, Texas-based Flores, who appears Thursday at Burbank’s Viva Cantina, is internationally known by her “Rockabilly Filly” handle, but she refuses to confine herself to any single style. From her teenage start in hometown San Antonio, Texas, with psych-folk girl group Penelope’s Flowers to the raunchy hillbilly thrash of infamous early ’80s Hollywood cowpunk coven the Screamin’ Sirens to a solo country music career launched by her acclaimed self-titled 1987 Reprise records debut, Flores has followed a course typified by a taste for artistic high adventure and an instinctive, richly expressive musicality.
While she made history as the first Latina female country artist ever to enter a single on the Billboard charts, Flores, at her core, loves to rock. Her volcanic brand of rockabilly brought her not only worldwide acclaim but also allowed her to work closely with two of the genre’s female architects, recording what turned out to be the final album by Virginia-born ’50s rockabilly wild girl Janis Martin and coaxing the growling Oklahoma firebrand Wanda Jackson (who had long since abandoned secular for spiritual music) back to performing her classic 1950s hits.
With a penetrating, communicative vocal style and a freewheeling guitar style that consistently displays a limitless, arresting musical vocabulary, Flores always avoids the predictable. Her current album Working Girl’s Guitar is an impressive set that showcases her prowess as six-string pyrotechnician. “That finally got my name on the cover of Guitar Player magazine, which I am very proud of. And they also did stories on me in Guitar World and Premiere Guitar,” she said. “I’ve been doing this since I was 16 and now, finally people think of me as a guitarist!”
Characteristically, she doesn’t stop there. “I started a jazz group also, the Blue Moon Jazz Quartet, where I don’t play guitar, I only sing, really using the voice as an instrument, seeing where the notes go, improvising, scat singing, the phrasing. There is just so much to explore.”
“And I am very excited about a recording I have coming up in Nashville, with some fantastic musicians, in June — we are planning to make a soul record. I’ve been throwing some R&B into my rockabilly sets for the last few years, songs by Wynonie Harris, Ruth Brown, and it really works out well. Now when people ask me what do I call music, I tell them it’s rockabilly-soul.”
Flores creative zeal gleams with an intense, inner light that’s always illuminated her impressive lifelong pursuit of an individualistic music. “I’ve always been trying to define my own sound, set my own style, with my writing and my guitar solos,” she said. “And I really do have a passionate romance with the guitar, it’s true. And it’s a good thing. It makes me very happy.”
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”