The house was packed at 3rd & Lindsley on the final night of Americanafest 2025. One icon - Rodney Crowell - turned the stage over to another - Rosie Flores - who appeared wearing a red fringe shimmy dress, a flower in her hair, and rose-tinted, cat eye sunglasses. She’d turned 75 years old three days prior with her dynamo still spinning. Apparently, 50 years of country-infused rock and roll will keep you young, if you think like Rosie.
“I feel somewhere between 19 and 27 in my brain,” Flores says early in Episode 343. “Once in a while I could have a few aches and pains, but that's only if I've been really, really, really busy dancing.”
That’s the spirit. She even has a relatively new band, a quartet she calls the Talismen. Mike Molnar joins her as a foil and partner on electric guitar. Michael Archer keeps the groove on the bass. And Chris Sensat isn’t only her drummer, but a dialed in harmony singer who lets her do beautiful classics like The Everly Brothers’ “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)”, which they did that night last September and which they cut on Rosie’s newest album Impossible Frontiers.
“In 2020 when we were all on lockdown, I started figuring out a way to bring money in. So I did a live stream on Facebook called Three’s A Charm,” she explains about the origins of this combo. She’d pick three songs by a single artist and work them up and tell stories about them. When she did the Everly Brothers, she called Chris, a fellow Austin-based musician, because she knew he sang well. “And when I heard the way that we sang, our harmonies sounded amazing together. It blew me away. And so he goes, ‘let's go in the studio and record it.’” That led to a masked-up session with some new guys, and when touring began, they became The Talismen, a lovely and clever band name drawn from a word that means a good luck charm.
We spend more time in this hour than I planned talking about her youth and her early forays into music-making, because it was so fun learning about her family and their support for her efforts. Her brother had a band that rehearsed in the garage, and he let her sing with them - “Heat Wave” is the first one she remembers. Then, when she noticed other girls at school who were playing music and coaxed them into a proto-band, her brother let them use his band’s equipment. And then it gets better: “My father was so turned on and just loved our band so much that he took us down to the music store and he signed for $5,000 worth of gear! He said, ‘You girls need to keep doing this.’ So I never looked back from age 16.”
Oscar Flores. Best music dad ever? After his passing, she remembered him sweetly in the 1999 song “Who’s Gonna Fix It Now?” on Dance Hall Dreams.
After establishing herself in her San Diego home area, Rosie moved to Los Angeles before the 1970s were out and played the circuit where a diverse alt-country revival was taking shape, a historic amalgam of honky tonk, old bluegrass and folk, and hard core rock and roll. She opened for Taj Mahal and Jerry Garcia. She met Dave Alvin and the Blasters, Linda Ronstadt, the folks from X, Asleep At The Wheel, Los Lobos, and Dwight Yoakam. She befriended another legendary namesake - Rose Maddox - one of the icons of traditional country. She’d go on to support and perform with other important women from her musical lineage, especially Wanda Jackson and Janis Martin.
Her first record deal was with Warner/Reprise, the top major label for good country and alternative roots music at the time. And it resulted in a critically acclaimed, self-titled debut (which is sadly not on the streamers and priced like a rarity online on CD). She laments the weak radio promotion but says otherwise it was a fine experience. She’s done better over time on indies like HighTone, Rounder, and Bloodshot. And to date she’s released 14 studio albums. But it’s the thousands of shows that really define Rosie’s career, one that was recently recognized at the highest levels with the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship in 2024.
“If I think about what gifts did God give me? I think I have a gift of making people happy when I perform,” she says late in our chat. “And so one of my silent prayers to myself every night before I get on stage is, please, let me make this audience happy. There's a light that comes on in people's eyes, and if I can see that brightness…I know I've done a good job.”
