Rosalie - The Lady with the Golden Ear
In a time when radio was king, she was queen. Rosalie Trombley was Music Director and one-person powerhouse at Windsor, Canada’s CKLW radio station from the late 1960s into the early 1980s — during a time when few women held positions of power in the broadcasting and recording industries. Rosalie passed away on November 23, 2021, and tributes from around the music industry poured in, remembering her as a person with a singular talent for picking the hits.
Rosalie began at CKLW as a part-time switchboard operator on Labor Day Weekend 1963. Following a promotion to the music library, she ultimately served as Music Director from 1968 to 1984. In that role, Rosalie was known as “The Most Powerful Lady in Pop Music,” according to a 1971 Detroit Free Press headline, because her musical taste so strongly influenced what songs received airtime on the station.
“It must be remembered that CKLW was in the Top Five most listened-to radio stations in North America,” says Rosalie’s son, Tim Trombley, Director of Entertainment at Caesars Windsor. “Although it broadcast from Windsor, CKLW was known as a Detroit radio station. It was heard in dozens of American states.”
The songs Rosalie chose to play were not lucky guesses.
“Every Monday, she called between forty and fifty record retailers throughout Michigan and Ohio to see what was selling,” Tim continues. “She combined that with her own instincts for a hit record, which included monitoring CKLW’s request line. She tabulated the data and based her decisions on the results.”
It’s clear, however, that Rosalie had a gift. After hearing an album cut by Elton John called “Bennie and the Jets,” played on Detroit soul station WJLB, Rosalie played the song on CKLW. The request lines lit up. The thing was, “Bennie and the Jets” was not scheduled to be a single from the album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. A song titled “Candle in the Wind” was supposed to be the next single.
It was not only Rosalie’s uncanny ability to pick hits that contributed to her stature in the music industry, but also her utter incorruptibility.
“Record label reps knew she was a single mom, raising three kids,” Tim says, “and there were times they offered her money to play a record. She just wouldn’t do it.
Rosalie also supported fellow Canadians, hearing a hit in the Guess Who’s single “These Eyes,” and in Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” among other Canadian artists who benefited from the station’s reach.
There was one Detroit musician for whom Rosalie had a particular fondness.
“She always had a love and affinity for Bob Seger,” says Tim. “CKLW was a catalyst in breaking Bob on a national level. Rosalie connected with his music, lyrically.”
Although she was a fan, that did not mean Seger’s music automatically made it to air on CKLW. As the New York Times obituary for Rosalie states: “Some of his new material came her way in the early 1970s, and she panned it. [Seger] sat down and wrote a song about her called ‘Rosalie’ — a tribute to her importance, but with a sly, critical undercurrent that they both laughed about later.”
The article quotes Rosalie as saying: “He was pissed off when he wrote that song about me. He told me!” Rosalie insisted the song never be played on CKLW upon penalty of her walking out the door. And they never played the song.
Story by Matthew St. Amand, Windsor Life Magazine