Most people are long retired by the time they reach 90 years old. But Gilda Pietragalla Downey isn’t your typical senior citizen.

The Marion resident’s commute to work is the flight of stairs from her apartment above the roadhouse-style bar that shares her name, Gilda’s Stone Rooster.

She wears pink highlights in her hair. She does errands in her 1980 red Trans Am.

The car, usually parked out front, serves as an open sign for better or worse.

“Awhile back I had it in the shop for a few days and I don’t think I had a single customer,” she said. “I had to call people to say I was still open.”

Downey and her late husband Paul opened the Stone Rooster on Route 6 near the Wareham line in 1979. The following year she started booking jazz musicians for Monday night shows.

The small bar has hosted big names in jazz, and last month the New Bedford Jazz Festival honored Downey with a lifetime achievement award for contributions to the South Coast jazz scene.

“I always ask members of the younger generation what they think jazz is all about,” she said. “Then I tell them it’s for lovers.”

She fell in love with music as a child in New Bedford. Her brother played drums and trumpet and Downey’s father brought her to watch him perform.

She recalls catching concerts at Lincoln Park in Dartmouth and the Picadilly Lounge in New Bedford.

Today, music still lifts her spirits.

“I could be having the worst day and just be in a terrible mood,” she said. “But when I hear those first few notes when the band plays, everything is OK.”

In the 1980s, Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone played at the bar while attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He’s since performed with the New York Philharmonic and toured the world.

Dave McKenna, another jazz pianist, also performed at the Stone Rooster. Originally from Rhode Island, McKenna played with Louis Armstrong at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1970.

Though famed jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillepsie never played at the Stone Rooster there is a photograph of him with Downey after a show he did in Boston. The picture is taped behind the bar.

That photograph shares space with pictures from her daughter’s wedding, Paul tending the bar, patron mementos and a 40-year-old Downey in a bathing suit.

“I sent that photograph to my husband when he was serving in Vietnam,” she said.

When Paul passed away in 2004 the community stepped in to help.

At times patrons have offered to install air conditioners, clean out the bar’s basement and most recently painted new parking lines.

Her clientele includes older people, Kittansett Club caddies, municipal workers and other characters.

“That’s the kind of people you’ll find here,” she said.

Though a hairdresser by trade (her old shop is now Nick’s Pizza in Mattapoisett) Downey decided to become a bartender after working as a cocktail waitress in Mattapoisett.

She then learned to bartend in Acushnet. With assistance from her parents, she purchased what was then called the Riverview and named it the Stone Rooster, which is what her maiden name – Pietragalla –  translates to in Italian. With a lifetime of memories behind her, Downey said she’s looking to the future.

“I’m still a young chick,” she said. “Age doesn’t mean anything.”