Tiny But Mighty: Rosie Flores Keeps Rockin’

Rosie Flores has been punk rock since before punk rock was even a thing. Born in San Antonio and raised in California, Flores has been making music since she was just a little girl with her daddy recording her on the kitchen table.

Flores, who started playing as a teenager in 1966, had no other females like her to look up to as rock and roll and electric guitar playing in general was a male dominated world. As she began playing, she saw herself as the first of her kind in music.

“As a teenager, I’ll tell you what, it was really empowering because it made me feel really unique and I felt like I was breaking new ground.”

Flores will bring her tasty guitar sounds to Houston performing as a duo with Chris Sensat, one of her “Talismen” on Friday, October 11 at The Continental Club.

“I’m a great guitar player and he’s a great drummer so we know how to fill it in and get the tones happening and then we have all these harmonies so there’s a lot of sound coming out of us for just two people,” describes Flores likening the duo the The White Stripes at times.

Austin-based Flores and her band The Talismen are currently wrapping up recording their first album as a group since forming in 2020. Flores invited Sensat to her lockdown livestream and quickly realized the two had a gift for harmonizing as evidenced in their track, “So Sad” which would even make The Everly Brothers smile.  

On her 2012 album, Working Girl’s Guitar, Flores sings about being “little but loud” and that description continues to encapsulate the tiny force of nature with a history that should make her, and the whole state of Texas, proud.

This year Flores was awarded as a National Heritage Fellow from the National Endowment For the Arts in Washington D.C. A distinguished honor for those who have shown a commitment to honoring their culture to future generations.

“To get chosen they want to know that you’re helping your community and reaching out to other people and I think in my case, they honored me in part because of me getting Wanda Jackson and Janice Martin back out and helping females learn to play the guitar. I think that they appreciated that I’ve influenced a lot of females to play music.”

Flores did do the almost impossible getting the “female Elvis” Janice Martin back into the studio to record The Blanco Sessions shortly before her death. Flores used her own drive, passion and Kickstarter to finally release the album in 2012.

“There are so many better female guitar players than me now and I never really made it huge as a female guitar player but I’ve made my own way and played guitar in my own band in my own music and that’s just kind of the way it’s gone. To finally be getting the recognition that I’ve gotten it’s just so meaningful to me, my fans and family because everybody knows how long I’ve been working at this and struggling, and it’s been a bit of a struggle.”

“To finally be getting the recognition that I’ve gotten it’s just so meaningful to me, my fans and family because everybody knows how long I’ve been working at this and struggling, and it’s been a bit of a struggle.”

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Flores grew up in San Diego with a family who loved and appreciated music. She recalls her mother singing beautifully during chores and her father’s passion for singing despite his “interesting” voice and lack of musical timing.

Her parents would play Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald and all the great singers of that time and Flores recalls them filling the house with those glorious sounds coming from the black and white TV and the radio, no doubt a big influence on her resounding voice.

“That’s all the music they fell in love to. That was their music and I think that they were still so in love with music that they were trying to teach their kids how to appreciate it all the way up until the end,” says Flores remembering enjoying jazz and Billie Holiday with her father, a shared pastime that continued up into the wee hours of the night as he was passing.

It was her father who not only recorded her after dinners with his two-track recorder, one song of which can be heard at the end of her fantastic 2014 album, Rockabilly Filly where a very recognizable Flores can be heard in her little baby voice crooning the words to “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter,” but he also financed her first all-girl band Penelope’s Children.

“He signed on a loan for five grand in those days which would be worth twenty grand now,” says Flores recalling how her dad would playfully tease the girls to keep on practicing and performing so he could pay the $80 a month bill on the gear.

The girls were happy and anxious to play, finding gigs around town at recreational halls and the officer gentlemen’s club on the Marine base where they would play their songs during happy hour.

Their gigs led them to play a strip joint where management slowly encouraged them to go topless and when Penelope’s Children said no thanks, they were let go. “It was little naked go-go dancers all around us and we just played rock and roll and the sailors loved us,” says Flores with a laugh.

The girls would drive their little “Volkswagen hippie van” to play gigs all the way to Flores native San Antonio where a little nightclub hired them and an 18-year-old Flores was showing up in newspaper ads.

“I’ve got so many archival photographs so it’s interesting to look back because when I look back I think to myself, oh it doesn’t seem that long but then when I look at all the pictures, all the contracts, all the newspapers and all the awards I go wait a minute, I’ve done a lot.”

Flores really has done a lot and was a huge part of the California punk rock and cow punk movements with her groups Rosie and The Screamers and The Screaming Sirens. Her major influence landed her recognition in The Country Music Hall of Fames current exhibit, Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock.

Later this month Flores will travel to Nashville to perform and speak as part of the exhibit. “That’s the handle they gave us ‘cowpunk’ because we were cowgirls and we played punk. We had a cowgirl style but we were kind of trashy too,” describes Flores.

She recalls her first impression of the punk rock scene, scary looking guys with safety pins in their ears and mohawks thinking to herself, “I wonder if they’re going to beat me up?” but as she’d get to the back door of the bars and clubs and ask for a light for her smoke, she began to see them differently.

“They’re sweet as pie and they are sweet and smart like John Doe and Exene. Smart and sweet people, okay cool I can live here. I can live in this world,” she remembers realizing with a smile in her voice.

It was her time on the road with The Screaming Sirens which began a project that she is hoping to wrap up now, a book of road stories and photographs of strange candy she collected from truck stops all over the United States.

“I’m not talking about Jr. Mints,” she says describing her awesome sounding collection of novelty items. It all started with a candy that was shaped like a washing machine with little treats inside shaped like dirty laundry. The girls got a kick out of it and then decided to search for the candy dryer so they could have the matching set.

From there, Flores began finding edible items that replicated real life like candy cigarettes, chocolate hair dryers and rollers and rock and roll peanut brittle microphones, which were unfortunately so tasty they did not survive to make her now well-preserved collection.

Her goal is to wrap up the book and be able to share her four decades of stories from the roads and stages of the country. “If I can do that, I’m going to feel like I’ve accomplished something really huge,” says Flores of her book. “I’ve been working on it for so many years and I’ve got a lot more stories to tell now.”

Rosie Flores will perform with Chris Sensat on Friday, October 11 at The Continental Club, 3700 Main, 7 p.m, $18-28.