For every one glossy guitar magazine’s Orianthi cover, rockabilly goddess Rosie Flores should be featured on ten.

Rockabilly singer-songwriter and guitarist Rosie Flores started out in the L.A. punk scene in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. She came from a Mexican-American family in San Antonio, Texas and started playing guitar at sixteen (“I thought I was really cool playing the guitar because no other chicks were doing it.”) having fallen in love with Jeff Beck. She played in an all-girl psychedelic country band, Penelope’s Children, as an acoustic solo performer, part of a duo, and several variations of Rosie and the (fill in the blank). Then she joined the all-female cowpunk/rockabilly band ¡The Screamin’ Sirens! with frontwoman Pleasant Gehman in L.A. in the early ‘80s. Members of the Sirens had brief cameos in The Vendetta and Reform School Girls and appeared in Runnin’ Kind.

Flores was part of the Americana roots music revival, with musicians like the Alvin brothers from The Blasters, X side project The Knitters, and Mike Ness from Social Distortion delving into original American country and folk music, acoustic instruments, and older recording techniques. It was musical fundamentalism, going back to the original sources. Flores, already an accomplished guitarist, started a rockabilly solo career in the mid-1980’s, releasing her first solo album in 1987. She has recorded with fellow rockabilly guitarist and singer Wanda Jackson and Janis Martin. Last year she released her thirteenth album, the magnificent Working Girl’s Guitar.

Despite the resurgence of female singers in country music throughout the ‘90s, Flores had little in common with performers like Shania Twain and Faith Hill.  She told No Depression in 1999:

I don’t want to say I complain, except to my close friends, but it does feel like the record industry has become more about how young and pretty you are than what you have to offer. Why does it have to be all about how you look? And I’m talking about the guys, too. To me, Lucinda Williams is one of the most gorgeous people I’ve ever seen. Her personality is so great; why can’t that be what she’s judged for? Why do people have to look like models?

Flores was inducted into her new hometown Austin’s Music Hall of Fame in 2007. Last year Venuszine named her one of the Top 75 Best Female Guitarists of All Time.

Rosie playing at NAMM 2008 in Anaheim, California, celebrating 65 years of Fender guitars, below: